Logical paradoxes
- Key People:
- Sam Loyd
- Fibonacci
- Robert Recorde
- Girolamo Cardano
- Related Topics:
- sudoku
- nim
- Tower of Hanoi
- cryptarithm
- tangram
Highly amusing and often tantalizing, logical paradoxes generally lead to searching discussions of the foundations of mathematics. As early as the 6th century bce, the Cretan prophet Epimenides allegedly observed that “All Cretans are liars,” which, in effect, means that “All statements made by Cretans are false.” Since Epimenides was a Cretan, the statement made by him is false. Thus the initial statement is self-contradictory. A similar dilemma was given by an English mathematician, P.E.B. Jourdain, in 1913, when he proposed the card paradox. This was a card on one side of which was printed:
“The sentence on the other side of this card is TRUE.”
On the other side of the card the sentence read:
“The sentence on the other side of this card is FALSE.”
The barber paradox, offered by Bertrand Russell, was of the same sort: The only barber in the village declared that he shaved everyone in the village who did not shave himself. On the face of it, this is a perfectly innocent remark until it is asked “Who shaves the barber?” If he does not shave himself, then he is one of those in the village who does not shave himself and so is shaved by the barber, namely, himself. If he shaves himself, he is, of course, one of the people in the village who is not shaved by the barber. The self-contradiction lies in the fact that a statement is made about “all” the members of a certain class, when the statement or the object to which the statement refers is itself a member of the class. In short, the Russell paradox hinges on the distinction between those classes that are members of themselves and those that are not members of themselves. Russell attempted to resolve the paradox of the class of all classes by introducing the concept of a hierarchy of logical types but without much success. Indeed, the entire problem lies close to the philosophical foundations of mathematics.