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.

Kurt Friedrich Godel was born in 1906 in Brunn (now Brno) in Moravia, the son of a textile factory manager. He went to the University of Vienna in 1924 to study mathematics, fell under the influence of Hans Hahn and the Vienna Circle, and took his doctorate in 1929 with a dissertation establishing the completeness of first-order predicate logic. His habilitation paper of 1930-1931 produced the two incompleteness theorems that bear his name.

After repeated American visits — to Princeton in 1933 and the Institute for Advanced Study from 1938 — he emigrated permanently in 1940 with his wife Adele, crossing the Soviet Union and the Pacific to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. From 1953 he was a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study. His major papers include 'On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems' (1931), 'The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum-Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory' (1940), and the philosophical essays on Russell, on Cantor's continuum problem, and on Carnap.

Godel's incompleteness theorems are the most far-reaching results of twentieth-century logic, showing that any consistent formal system rich enough to encode arithmetic contains true statements it cannot prove. His philosophical Platonism, his late ontological argument for the existence of God, and his correspondence with Einstein on rotating universe solutions extended his influence well beyond logic. He died of self-starvation at Princeton in January 1978.