Berry paradox

The Berry paradox is a self-referential paradox arising from an expression like "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters" (a phrase with fifty-seven letters).

Bertrand Russell, the first to discuss the paradox in print, attributed it to G. G. Berry (1867–1928),[1] a junior librarian at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Russell called Berry "the only person in Oxford who understood mathematical logic".[2] The paradox was called "Richard's paradox" by Jean-Yves Girard.[3]

  1. ^ Griffin 2003, p. 63.
  2. ^ Moore 2014, Appendix IV.
  3. ^ Girard 2011, p. 16.