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Barber paradox

The Barber paradox is a paradox with importance to mathematical logic and set theory. The paradox considers a town with a male barber who daily shaves every man who does not shave himself, and no one else. Such a town cannot exist:
  • If the barber does not shave himself, he must bide by the rule and shave himself.
  • If he does shave himself, according to the rule he will not shave himself.
Thus the rule results in an impossible situation.

This paradox is attributed to the British logician Bertrand Russell, who in 1901 constructed Russell's paradox to demonstrate the self-contradictory nature of Cantor's elementary set theory by formalizing the Barber paradox. The paradox also underlies the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem as well as Alan Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem.

Referenced By

Goedel's incompleteness theorem | Grelling-Nelson paradox | Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem | Gödel's proof | Gödel's second incompleteness theorem | Halting Problem | Hilbert's second problem | Hilberts second problem | Il barbiere di Siviglia | Incompleteness Theorem | List of all lists which do not contain themselves | List of mathematical topics | List of mathematical topics (A-C) | List of mathematics topics | List of philosophical topics | List of philosophical topics (A-C) | Paradox | Russell's Paradox | Russells Paradox | The Barber of Seville | The halting problem | Weyl's Paradox

 

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Barber paradox".

 

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