Undecidability Tangent (History of Undecidability Part 1) - Computerphile

What was the first undecidable problem? Professor Brailsford takes us on a computerphile tangent & gives us his angle on a pre-computer example of undecidability. Note from Professor Brailsford: a couple of corrections for this film: 1/ "... early 18th Century" for Gauss should be " ... early 19th century" 2/ "... 100 years ago" for Newton should be "... 100 years before Gauss 3/ The Greek word I was struggling with was "Boeotians". I have now taken expert advice which tells me that the "oe" is pronounced "ee" as in "Oedipus". Hence a reasonable approximation to the correct pronunciation is "Bee-oh-shuns" 4/ In my excitement to get the message across I sometimes refer, in the video, to Euclid's 5th axiom being a "proposition". However it is more accurately a "postulate" i.e. something which should be provable from the other axioms/postulates of the Euclidean system. The fact that it can't be thus proved means that the other axioms are insufficiently powerful to prove it -- hence it is "undecidable" within that axiom system." Riemann Hypothesis – Numberphile: http://youtu.be/d6c6uIyieoo Fermat's Last Theorem – Numberphile: http://youtu.be/qiNcEguuFSA Turing & The Halting Problem: http://youtu.be/macM_MtS_w4 http://www.facebook.com/computerphile https://twitter.com/computer_phile This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley. Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: http://bit.ly/nottscomputer Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. See the full list of Brady's video projects at: http://bit.ly/bradychannels