A historically (and mathematically) inaccurate thread on Turing, Godel and Computing. Explained in as simple words as I am able to.
Basically there were two smart chaps named Bertrand Russel (BR) and Alfred Whitehead (AW) who were a bit sad about how math people were going about things. They felt that maths was built on shaky foundations, and that too many math facts were known, but not proven.
A proof is basically a way of putting different other proven or known math facts together in a way that other math people can't argue with to produce new math facts (because unlike Mr Ben Shapiro, who uses the other meaning of facts and logic, math people respect the older meaning)
Anyway, so BR and AW, were like "What happens if we try find the smallest number of math facts needed to prove the other math facts". And so they did, sort of. In a very long winded way. Even going so far as to find ways to prove that 1+1=2, which was surprisingly hard. Anyway they got lots of work done
_ Later a guy named Kurt Gödel (KG) came along and read their work. And asked why they picked those particular math facts as the foundation. And being a math guy, also asked if he could do math things to the math fact systems like those invented by BR and AW.
Because if you could do that, then you could do proofs about doing proofs!
Proofs and math facts are made up of math symbols. They look usually greek, but greeks can't really understand them, it is greek to them.
And proofs are built out of math facts
So KG being the OG that he was, was like ok then. If I can figure out a way of writing all the possibly true/false math facts and proofs out in a way that can be counted, then perhaps I can filter out the false math facts from the true ones or do other interestingly weird things. It would make my work easier, because then I don't have to write all the proofs, I just need to write the proof maker and also prove that the proof maker is making true math facts.
KG probably pretended he was a spy at school, and so knew that you could write secret messages using numbers. If you you could write down all the maybe true math facts as numbers, you could basically just build a math fact generator by just writing down all the numbers between 0 and infinity (which is sort of the biggest number, it's very big, even Jeff Bezos isn't next door neighbours with infinity).
That was the easy part. KG still needed the bit that separates the true math facts from the false math facts
But he could start playing around with the math facts now and do math on them
This eventually led to trouble
And made everyone except possibly God very sad
Cause KG found a big problem
Because he found that you could either generate some of the true math facts in his system but not all of them, or generate all the true math facts, but leave in some false ones. You couldn't have both
And this applied to any math fact system.
Any that you could possibly think of
Which meant that you just can't prove some things
(Which is a lesson we should take to heart in our lives as trans people)