meta- is a concept in
philosophy and
linguistics in used for
talking about
things. Yea, thats pretty
vague. Some examples are
Metasyntax is the language used for
talking about
syntax. A
metasearch engine is a
search engine of
search
engines.
Metafont is an abstraction of fonts used for describing various
letters are displayed. Let us not forget about a
metanode
This concept was first used by David Hilbert in the sense that we use
it in metalanguage, metatheory, and metasystem. He introduced
the term metamathematics to denote a mathematical theory of mathematical
proof. That is, a mapping of proofs in the form of natural language text
onto a set of texts in a formal logical language which makes it possible
to treat proofs as precisely defined mathematical objects. This lead
to Godel's Theorem.