"Gregory Chaitin is
at the IBM Watson Research Center in New York. In the mid
1960s, when he was a teenager, he created algorithmic information
theory (AIT), which combines, among other elements, Shannon's information
theory and Turing's theory of computability. In the three decades
since then he has been the principal architect of the theory. Among
his contributions are the definition of a random sequence via
algorithmic incompressibility, and his information-theoretic approach
to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. His work on Hilbert's 10th
problem has shown that in a sense there is randomness in arithmetic,
in other words, that God not only plays dice in quantum mechanics and
nonlinear dynamics, but even in elementary number theory.
His latest achievement has been to transform AIT into a theory about
the size of real computer programs, programs that you can actually run.
He is the
author of six books: Algorithmic Information Theory published
by Cambridge University Press; Information, Randomness &
Incompleteness and Information-Theoretic Incompleteness,
both published by World Scientific; and The Limits of
Mathematics, The Unknowable and Exploring Randomness,
all published by Springer-Verlag.
In 1995 he was given the
degree of doctor of science honoris causa by the University of Maine,
and he was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology.
In 1998 he was named visiting professor at the University of Buenos
Aires."
-quoted from G J Chaitin Homepage
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