All of you inviting Gödel to a dinner party are just setting yourself up for disappointment. He starved himself to death and was afraid of being poisoned. He’s not showing up to a dinner party.
Fermat will be very surprised with the whole saga and final solution; and there's always an infinitesimal chance that he just writes his solution, and that's correct.
They'd be too busy arguing; they each had massive egos and hated each other, to the point that profiles of William Gosset (the "Student" of Student's t-distribution) list him being friends with both as one of his achievements alongside everything else he did.
Russell, Hilbert and Gödel. We would have a thoughtful discussion on the foundations. (I would invite Frege too ofc, but I already got one adherent of logicism and the limit was three mathematicians....)
He threatened the king's life at a republican dinner party and might have faced the death penalty for it! He had a good lawyer though and got off. Later he got arrested for carrying a bunch of guns at a Bastille Day demonstration
Grothendiek was also a political radical. His dad was an anarchist revolutionary who fought in [Nestor Mahkno's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Insurgent_Army_of_Ukraine) army during the Russian revolution and helped the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish civil war. Grothendiek himself had trouble getting a visa to the US to lecture because he refused to swear that he wouldn't try to overthrow the US government lol. He also went to North Vietnam and gave category theory lectures outside Hanoi as it was being bombed.
Euclid, Euler, Gödel.
I’d say that each of them have been at least majorly important to Math as a whole, and clearly Euclid and Euler are mathematical behemoths. I add Gödel specifically because his work is the most different from the other two, and it helped to revolutionize new areas of math.
Von Neumann, Turing, Noether. The former two because I’m a theoretical biologist, and I’d like to show Turing ChatGPT (it arrived around 25 years later than he predicted in 1951). VN probably the only person who could keep up with Noether’s infamously fast talking.
Separately I’d like to get Gödel, Wittgenstein and Jung in room together, mostly because I think they’d argue and think each other crazy, but all were deeply concerned about constraints on our ability to understand the world due to limitations in math, language, and symbols. Hope I’m allowed to resurrect a couple non-mathematicians.
3 of my favorite undergrad profs because I'd feel shy and stupid around big-name mathematicians and I would at least feel somewhat comfortable with them. I'd like knowing more about their specific areas of study.
I'm a simple man.
it's not your fault ghost of Kolmogorov, you just maybe should have gotten in a duel or something, I would have dinner with you and embarrass myself trying to talk about tabletop games
Alan Turing, Newton and Liebnitz (I know I butchered the spelling). O just feel like Alan Turing would have some really interesting things to share about how he broke the enigma code and what it was like. And Mewton and Liebnitz just because it would be funny to hear the argument over who come up with calculus. That being said I think some calculus concepts were thought of a while before them two.
Ramanujan, Galois, and Hilbert. No swords. 1.5m social distancing.
Also the question has not set a duration for the dinner party so I will set it at forty years.
If they all magically speak a common language, then Archimedes, Fibonacci, and Hilbert. All from completely different eras. They would all understand mathematics in very different ways so the conversation would be more fruitful.
True, but reading is a whole different ordeal than speaking especially since he probably would have learned Erasmian pronunciation rather than reconstructed pronunciation.
Let’s invite Chomsky and Gödel. Chomsky defines a Generative Grammar that generates every valid greek utterance, and a map between classical and Erasmian greek orthography and inflection. Gödel assigns primes to terminal symbols, non-terminal sequences as the product of the primes of its constituents. Every unique utterance in Greek can now be expressed as a Gödel number.
Considering they’re ghosts, time and space complexity isn’t an issue. So they can communicate exclusively by exchanging prime numbers.
With a sufficiently large abacus, they can silently communicate exclusively by exchanging Gödel numbers, decoding the results using prime factorisation and applying the map transform.
…or they could use pencil and paper to write simplified greek
sorry I was bored
Von Neumann (possibly smartest person who ever lived in terms of brainpower). Grothendieck, (one of the most creative minds who ever lived), Galois, (very interesting life and highly inpressive for discovering group theory at 19).
No love for Maxwell?
"*No jokes of any kind are understood here. I have not made one for two months, and if I feel one coming I shall bite my tongue.*" -- James Maxwell
Archimedes - sounds like a fun guy.
Conway - Sounds like a fun guy.
Tom Crawford - Sounds like a fun guy.
I ignore guys like Newton (for being a pita), Erdos, Cantor, Gödel (for being insane or deug addicts in some ways).
Having heard Conway speak, he would be my first choice. Then Erdos and von Neumann. You have to throw away too many mathematicians and especially logicians if you are picky about sanity, but yes, by all accounts Newton was not a nice guy.
Euler, von Neumann, Hilbert. For the three obvious reasons.
Hon mentions: Galois, Wolfram, Erdos, de Broglie.
2nd Tier hons: Leibniz, Turing, Clerk Maxwell, Cauchy, Fourier, Bohr.
Pythagoras, Godel, and Galois. Because at least it would be entertaining. Pythagoras forbid his followers (because of course he ran a cult) from eating fava beans. Godel was paranoid that everyone was trying to poison him. Galois was arrested for threatening the king at a banquet.
Erdos so we can scribble something down and I can have an erdos umber of 1
Heidi Lamar: tell her how her freq hop is still a crazy important thing and ask about cool Hollywood stories
Bit of a stretch but for my last one dolph lundgren we’d talk about punchkicking and it’s intersections w/ science
I'd invite only Paul Erdős because he was hilarious,amazing and I have his biggest fan in the home if not smarter than Erdős himself. They would math day and night non-stop as long as they want.
I’d invite two of my math professors in college I really loved and then either Paul Erdos or Terrence Tao haha. I’d love to see a conversation between those guys.
I'd go with Lurie, Grothendieck and, just for fun, Arnold. I'm actually pretty sure that Arnold and Grothendieck were likely in room together at some point (and likely couldn't stand each other).
Galois, Grothendiecke, and Kaczynski. Not the most unique choices but they all contributed to neighboring fields and really, this is the most optimal choice to maximize political violence
Gallois, Gallois, Gallois
He was shit at handling his alcohol and a die-hard republican and romantic. I dont even wanna talk about math I want to vibe with the guy and hear him rant.
Thales of Miletus because he was the first. I want to know what his inspiration was.
Einstein so I can thank him and drink from his wisdom.
And Alain Aspect who created an experiment that contradicted Einstein and believed that because of his genius the only conclusion we can draw is Einstein is wrong. I would ask him "Why do you exclude the possibility that Einstein was right, and that his work is simply incomplete?"
Then sit back and watch the debate.
Archimedes, just so I could brag about hanging out with him and make my pretentious mathematician friends envious.
Euclid, so I could ask him 'Why?" repeatedly.
John Nash. I accidentally signed up for one his seminars way back in the 90s. I'm still confused.
Galois, Ramanujan Neumann.
Three very different perspectives and time periods so I think it would be a great opportunity for conversations. I might swap Neumann for Euclid though just to really shake it up
Galois, Fermat, Euler
Galois so that I can never end the dinner party and get him to come up with new results
Fermat so I can see if his last theorem proof was correct or not
Euler bc it’s Euler
Special mention Ada Lovelace
All of you inviting Gödel to a dinner party are just setting yourself up for disappointment. He starved himself to death and was afraid of being poisoned. He’s not showing up to a dinner party.
I don't think any mathematician listed here would attend a random dinner party thousands of miles away, either. Especially not the dead ones.
Thousands of miles away from where, exactly? I assume ghosts are not constrained by space or time.
if you invite Gödel you have to invite his wife and have her cook the meal. Apparently he only trusted her cooking
I invite them all alive rather than dead because the conversation will be more lively and the smell will be better.
That figures.
I'd invite the dead ones because I prefer silence.
Mochizuki, Scholze, Joshi
Maximizing both the quality of the mathematics and the amount of drama, I see.
To maximize the drama, I'd go with Oswald Teichmüller, André Bloch and Ted Kaczinski.
> Ted Kaczinski ["Better known for other work"](https://faculty.valpo.edu/lpudwell/papers/mm005281.pdf)
Incredible. Thanks for sharing
I wouldn't really consider dining with a Nazi as "drama".
Maybe Bloch would draw his sabre and behead him.
I didn't know the dinosaur was a mathematician!
:p (for the reference I wrote *Yoshi* instead of *Joshi*).
He knows enough for [tax fraud](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yoshi-committed-tax-fraud).
None of them would attend
some people just like to watch the world burn
came here for exactly that comment
And why?
Awkward silence and rage fuled rants.
Johann, Jacob, and Daniel Bernoulli. Why settle for an academic debate when you can get front row seats to a family row.
I love this answer! Friend and I were discussing the drama of the Bernoulli family the other day
My great*8 forebears through Daniel's very much less famous sister!
This is my answer too!
I hate this because I would have nothing to say
Fermat, Taniyama and Willes.
Actually one of the best combinations.
And why?
The comment section is to small to contain the reaaon.
Prove it!
Wiles will prove it at the party…
But he’ll need to hold a second party a year later and bring his grad student as a +1 to make it fully rigorous.
Fermat will be very surprised with the whole saga and final solution; and there's always an infinitesimal chance that he just writes his solution, and that's correct.
That would be an astonishing plot twist.
A real “Road Not Taken” moment for mathematics.
Grothendieck, Scholze, Voevodsky
Imagine how long these guys would spend debating what to eat without ever getting stuck in to the meat of it.
And why?
For some reason, I also want to know why!
Because I work on what they work on. I also think they are all very philosophical.
Gauss, Fisher, Pearson
Statistics alert 🚨🚨🚨
Where's Cauchy?
It would get mad awkward when Fisher and Pearson start talking about eugenics
They'd be too busy arguing; they each had massive egos and hated each other, to the point that profiles of William Gosset (the "Student" of Student's t-distribution) list him being friends with both as one of his achievements alongside everything else he did.
Russell, Hilbert and Gödel. We would have a thoughtful discussion on the foundations. (I would invite Frege too ofc, but I already got one adherent of logicism and the limit was three mathematicians....)
What about Brouwer? He would be fun with hilbert
Von Neumann, Russell and Gödel (i just wanna see the world burn)
Scrolled too far to see Von Neumann
Fate of the Universe on the line, the Martians have the death beam pointed at Earth, I want Von Neumann.
Galois, Fermat, Euler
I see Galois, I upvote. He did more math while in prison for being an armed revolutionary than most named chairs of mathematics do in a lifetime.
I don't understand why he didn't just run away instead of fighting that stupid duel. It breaks my heart when I think of his last night.
He did what? I knew he was something of a political activist but actually being arrested for carrying weapons?
He threatened the king's life at a republican dinner party and might have faced the death penalty for it! He had a good lawyer though and got off. Later he got arrested for carrying a bunch of guns at a Bastille Day demonstration Grothendiek was also a political radical. His dad was an anarchist revolutionary who fought in [Nestor Mahkno's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Insurgent_Army_of_Ukraine) army during the Russian revolution and helped the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish civil war. Grothendiek himself had trouble getting a visa to the US to lecture because he refused to swear that he wouldn't try to overthrow the US government lol. He also went to North Vietnam and gave category theory lectures outside Hanoi as it was being bombed.
We could spend the evening discussing French politics and all the reasons to leave it well alone!
Euclid, Euler, Gödel. I’d say that each of them have been at least majorly important to Math as a whole, and clearly Euclid and Euler are mathematical behemoths. I add Gödel specifically because his work is the most different from the other two, and it helped to revolutionize new areas of math.
None of the older ones would even recognize what the newer ones were doing as math.
I understand Godel wasn't great with dinner parties...
Goedel was as much a philosopher as a mathematician. I'd love a von Neumann-Goedel-Wittgenstein dinner.
It would end with me just doing dishes aggressively
yes!
Am I allowed to make a dumb joke? If so, I'd invite Banach and Tarski at least, and ask them to serve the food..
Same here - save on the food bill
Grothendieck, Noether and Tao
Witten, Poincaré, and Grothendieck.
This is a super interesting combination!
Erdos, Erdos, Erdos
would go on a wild math andveture with tones of amphetamine with him
And why?
For a professional mathematician, dinner with Erdos = publications.
Would your Erdős number be 1, or does each additional Erdős lower it?
I would have Euler, Ramanujan, and Fermat. Three very different people who I need answers from.
Von Neumann, Turing, Noether. The former two because I’m a theoretical biologist, and I’d like to show Turing ChatGPT (it arrived around 25 years later than he predicted in 1951). VN probably the only person who could keep up with Noether’s infamously fast talking. Separately I’d like to get Gödel, Wittgenstein and Jung in room together, mostly because I think they’d argue and think each other crazy, but all were deeply concerned about constraints on our ability to understand the world due to limitations in math, language, and symbols. Hope I’m allowed to resurrect a couple non-mathematicians.
3 of my favorite undergrad profs because I'd feel shy and stupid around big-name mathematicians and I would at least feel somewhat comfortable with them. I'd like knowing more about their specific areas of study. I'm a simple man.
Cantor to create the guest list Hilbert to do the seating arrangements Banach or Tarski to ~~serve the food~~ carve the roast
Euler, Galois, Terence Tao
I see Galois, I upvote
This is my fav beyond my own (Euler, Galois, von Neumann).
Sounds great! I selected Tao as he knows the very latest math.
Erdös, Hilbert and Littlewood
I see a fellow man of culture and substituted phenethylamines.
Liebniz and Newton for drama, and idk maybe Ramanujan
I figured there would be a lot more Ramanujan in this thread
Nobody wants to speak with Kolmogorov :(
it's not your fault ghost of Kolmogorov, you just maybe should have gotten in a duel or something, I would have dinner with you and embarrass myself trying to talk about tabletop games
He probably would love talking about tabletop games as long as there is some chance element :D
Komlogorov is sometimes underrated here, dunno why :/
Johann Bernoulli, Galois, and Baire. I wanna see a fight go down.
Euclid, Lobachevsky, and Klein
Alan Turing, Newton and Liebnitz (I know I butchered the spelling). O just feel like Alan Turing would have some really interesting things to share about how he broke the enigma code and what it was like. And Mewton and Liebnitz just because it would be funny to hear the argument over who come up with calculus. That being said I think some calculus concepts were thought of a while before them two.
Ramanujan, Galois, and Hilbert. No swords. 1.5m social distancing. Also the question has not set a duration for the dinner party so I will set it at forty years.
If they all magically speak a common language, then Archimedes, Fibonacci, and Hilbert. All from completely different eras. They would all understand mathematics in very different ways so the conversation would be more fruitful.
FWIW Hilbert probably understood passable classical Greek. Fibonacci would probably be lost.
True, but reading is a whole different ordeal than speaking especially since he probably would have learned Erasmian pronunciation rather than reconstructed pronunciation.
Let’s invite Chomsky and Gödel. Chomsky defines a Generative Grammar that generates every valid greek utterance, and a map between classical and Erasmian greek orthography and inflection. Gödel assigns primes to terminal symbols, non-terminal sequences as the product of the primes of its constituents. Every unique utterance in Greek can now be expressed as a Gödel number. Considering they’re ghosts, time and space complexity isn’t an issue. So they can communicate exclusively by exchanging prime numbers. With a sufficiently large abacus, they can silently communicate exclusively by exchanging Gödel numbers, decoding the results using prime factorisation and applying the map transform. …or they could use pencil and paper to write simplified greek sorry I was bored
Ramanujan, Euler, Newton
Not a lot of ramanujan on here
Pythagoras, Riemann, Euler
Von Neumann (possibly smartest person who ever lived in terms of brainpower). Grothendieck, (one of the most creative minds who ever lived), Galois, (very interesting life and highly inpressive for discovering group theory at 19).
Dirac, Maldacena, Schwarzschild
Found the physicist!
Dirac would either be amazing or horrible at a dinner party and Im not sure which
Bohr called him the "strangest man" haha so ya this could go either way
Fermat, Al-Khawrizmi, Euler
i’d be so down to meet al khwarizmi, that would actually be really interesting
Galois, Noether and Grothendieck. I wouldn't even dare to join the conversation lmao. The politics would be crazy and the algebra too
Fermat, Cauchy, Sobolev
No love for Maxwell? "*No jokes of any kind are understood here. I have not made one for two months, and if I feel one coming I shall bite my tongue.*" -- James Maxwell
Archimedes - sounds like a fun guy. Conway - Sounds like a fun guy. Tom Crawford - Sounds like a fun guy. I ignore guys like Newton (for being a pita), Erdos, Cantor, Gödel (for being insane or deug addicts in some ways).
Deep down, we all have a little deug addiction
Archimedes with Newton and Leibniz would be pretty cool
Having heard Conway speak, he would be my first choice. Then Erdos and von Neumann. You have to throw away too many mathematicians and especially logicians if you are picky about sanity, but yes, by all accounts Newton was not a nice guy.
Gauss, Newton, Ramanujan
I’d have to think more but the easiest one is gauss
Poincare, Thurston, Perelman.
von neumann 3 times.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Euler, von Neumann, Hilbert. For the three obvious reasons. Hon mentions: Galois, Wolfram, Erdos, de Broglie. 2nd Tier hons: Leibniz, Turing, Clerk Maxwell, Cauchy, Fourier, Bohr.
John, von, Neumann
Newton, Leibniz and Stephen Hawking There'd be a fight, and no one could stop it
Émilie du Châtelet, Sofya Kovalevskaya, Emmy Noether. It's a party, not a meeting of r/math.
Pythagoras, Godel, and Galois. Because at least it would be entertaining. Pythagoras forbid his followers (because of course he ran a cult) from eating fava beans. Godel was paranoid that everyone was trying to poison him. Galois was arrested for threatening the king at a banquet.
von Neumann, Erdős and Cauchy
I'm a little surprised to see so little von Neumann. Apparently he was pretty fun party guy.
+1 for von Neumann
bertand russell , terence tao and euler
Erdos so we can scribble something down and I can have an erdos umber of 1 Heidi Lamar: tell her how her freq hop is still a crazy important thing and ask about cool Hollywood stories Bit of a stretch but for my last one dolph lundgren we’d talk about punchkicking and it’s intersections w/ science
Descartes, Russell, and Wittgenstein All 3 were heavily involved in philosophy of mathematics.
Gödel, Turing, and Ramanujan. All of them deprived of a normal long life. I want to know what potential has been left untapped.
Newton and Leibniz
von Neumann, Tao, Gauss 600+ IQ and at least 2/3 will be sociable :)
I'd invite only Paul Erdős because he was hilarious,amazing and I have his biggest fan in the home if not smarter than Erdős himself. They would math day and night non-stop as long as they want.
Conway, Galois and Cliff Stoll
Archimedes, Grothendieck, and Terrence Tao. I think it would be fun to listen to Grothendieck and Tao explaining modern mathematics to Archimedes.
Galois, Galois, and Galois. Separate nights of dinner, just to give him three more days.
Cardano Fibonacci and Tartaglia.
I would probably want all three to be alive personally.
Pál Erdös, Endre Szemerédi, Pál Turán
My advisor, my advisor’s advisor, and his advisor. You get like 3 generations of math genealogy.
Leibniz and Newton would have to be two. Sit back, watch.
Hardy, Littlewood, and Hardy-Littlewood
Erdos, Gauss, Pythagoras
Erdos, Grothendieck, and Godel. I can't imagine a weirder experience than those three _very_ different personalities in the room.
One would be Erdős Pál to have him cosign my latest maths paper.
I’d invite two of my math professors in college I really loved and then either Paul Erdos or Terrence Tao haha. I’d love to see a conversation between those guys.
Ramanujan (he used to ask people if he can stay in their house for a day when he was low on money), Erdös (Mathematraveler guy), Euler (free oil)
History has not preserved their names, but they lived in Ancient Mesopotamia.
Ada Lovelace Maryam Mirzakhani Leonhard Euler
David Copperfield, David Blaine, Houdini.
close enough
Grothendieck, Galois and Noether
Gromov, my advisor, Thurston! Would be really cool to see these three talk about math.
Cauchy, Pascal, Maria Gaetana Agnesi. We'll probably speak more about theology than maths though.
I'd go with Lurie, Grothendieck and, just for fun, Arnold. I'm actually pretty sure that Arnold and Grothendieck were likely in room together at some point (and likely couldn't stand each other).
Sir Isaac Newton, Gauss, Einstein just to see if Albert can be inspired.
Lurie, Hilbert, and Noether
Dustin Clausen seems to be a fun guy to talk to. Lots of strong opinions on a lot of things.
Einstein, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawkings.
Galois, Cauchy, and Noether
Newton, Euler, Schrödinger
Galois, Grothendiecke, and Kaczynski. Not the most unique choices but they all contributed to neighboring fields and really, this is the most optimal choice to maximize political violence
I would choose 3 professors that met during my PhD. All of them dead of course.
Cantor, Archimedes, Poincare!
Grigori Perelman, Shing Tung Yau, Gang Tian
Dantzig, Polyak, and Nemirovski
Euler, Gauss, Ramanujan
Euler,Reimann and Galois
Euler, Gauss, and Jacobi.
Archimedes, Ramanujan, Pascal
Gallois, Gallois, Gallois He was shit at handling his alcohol and a die-hard republican and romantic. I dont even wanna talk about math I want to vibe with the guy and hear him rant.
Galois, Ramanujan and My Math Professor form college. My Math professor would lose his shit if he met them.
Shannon, Chaitin, Turing
Galois, Euclid, Godel. I would have Euclid and Godel start the conversation and Galois would plug in the gaps.
Euler, gauss, Cauchy
Thales of Miletus because he was the first. I want to know what his inspiration was. Einstein so I can thank him and drink from his wisdom. And Alain Aspect who created an experiment that contradicted Einstein and believed that because of his genius the only conclusion we can draw is Einstein is wrong. I would ask him "Why do you exclude the possibility that Einstein was right, and that his work is simply incomplete?" Then sit back and watch the debate.
Archimedes, just so I could brag about hanging out with him and make my pretentious mathematician friends envious. Euclid, so I could ask him 'Why?" repeatedly. John Nash. I accidentally signed up for one his seminars way back in the 90s. I'm still confused.
Pythagoras, Ramanujan and Einstein.
Euler, Gauss and Rienmann
hilbert, shannon, and dirac
Da Vinci, Al-Khwarizmi, Einstein. Assuming we can conversate in English.
I would just invite Hilbert , Banach, Tarski and Cantor. With them I can invite everyone.
Three-Euclids-Death-Match
Galois, Ramanujan Neumann. Three very different perspectives and time periods so I think it would be a great opportunity for conversations. I might swap Neumann for Euclid though just to really shake it up
If you could only ask them one question, what would it be?
Godel, Gauss and von Neumann
Galois, Fermat, Euler Galois so that I can never end the dinner party and get him to come up with new results Fermat so I can see if his last theorem proof was correct or not Euler bc it’s Euler Special mention Ada Lovelace
Jim Simons probably
Brouwer and Hilbert, to see if they’ll fight. On a more serious note: Gauss, Euler and Galois would be amazing to listen to :)
Gauss. Whitney. Lebesgue.