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Tractatus Wittgensteino-Markovus
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File last updated 9 April 2002

Copyright 2002 by Thane Plambeck
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What is this thing?
It's a program that generates oracular utterances by performing unspeakable acts on the text of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

If you find the resulting content profound, you are perhaps mentally ill. It may be time to ask your physician about those medications you've been hearing about on television.

Click here to try it out now.

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22 Feb 2002
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

From the book Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Harper Collins Publishers, 2001:

The text of the Tractatus is sandwiched between its well-known opening and closing statements: "The world is all that is the case" and "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent." It is written in intriguingly numbered paragraphs, 1 to 7, with decimal numbers reflecting the relative significance of their subclauses, 1.0 being more significant than 1.1, which is in turn more significant than 1.11, and 1.111. For example:

4 A thought is a proposition with a sense.
4.001 The totality of propositions is language.
4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality...

The monograph is remarkable for its combination of luminosity and oracular brevity, its impregnable confidence teetering on the edge of dogmatism (Popper certainly thought it dogmatic), and its unwillingness to demean itself by supporting its numbered propositions in any conventional way. The individual sentences have a pure and simple beauty---indeed, The Times obituary of Wittgenstein described the Tractatus as "a logical poem."

Read it here.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig (Josef Johann)
Encyclopædia Britannica Article


Born April 26, 1889, Vienna
Died April 29, 1951, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.

Austrian-born English philosopher, who was one of the most influential figures in British philosophy during the second quarter of the 20th century and who produced two original and influential systems of philosophical thought—his logical theories and later his philosophy of language.

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Andrei Andreyevich Markov

Born: 14 June 1856 in Ryazan, Russia
Died: 20 July 1922 in Petrograd (now St Petersburg), Russia


Andrei A Markov was a graduate of Saint Petersburg University (1878), where he began as a professor in 1886. Markov's early work was mainly in number theory and analysis, continued fractions, limits of integrals, approximation theory and the convergence of series.

After 1900 Markov applied the method of continued fractions, pioneered by his teacher Pafnuty Chebyshev, to probability theory. He also studied sequences of mutually dependent variables, hoping to establish the limiting laws of probability in their most general form. He proved the central limit theorem under fairly general assumptions.

Markov is particularly remembered for his study of Markov chains, sequences of random variables in which the future variable is determined by the present variable but is independent of the way in which the present state arose from its predecessors. This work launched the theory of stochastic processes.

In 1923 Norbert Wiener became the first to treat rigorously a continuous Markov process. The foundation of a general theory was provided during the 1930s by Andrei Kolmogorov.

Markov was also interested in poetry and he made studies of poetic style. Kolmogorov had similar interests.

Markov had a son (of the same name) who was born on September 9, 1903 and followed his father in also becoming a renowned mathematician.