Kurt Godel 1906 – 1978

Kurt Friedrich Godel was an Austrian-American mathematician, logician, and philosopher and one of the most important logicians in the history of the discipline. His incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, demonstrated that any consistent formal system of elementary arithmetic is incomplete and that its consistency cannot be proved within the system itself, decisively reshaping the philosophy of mathematics. After fleeing Vienna in 1940 he spent the rest of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein was his closest friend. His later philosophical writings defended a form of Platonism about mathematical objects.