Kurt Gödel

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher whose incompleteness theorems reshaped twentieth-century understandings of mathematics, computation, and the limits of formal reasoning. He was born Kurt Friedrich Gödel on April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic), the second son of Rudolf Gödel, manager of a textile factory, and Marianne Handschuh. A frail and inquisitive child, he was nicknamed Herr Warum ("Mr. Why") by his family.

He entered the University of Vienna in 1924, initially intending to study physics but soon turning to mathematics and mathematical logic. He completed his doctorate in 1929 under Hans Hahn with a dissertation proving the completeness of first-order predicate logic, and joined the circle of philosophers and mathematicians associated with the Vienna Circle.

In 1931 he published "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme," establishing his two incompleteness theorems: any consistent formal system rich enough to express arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proved within the system, and such a system cannot prove its own consistency. The result overturned David Hilbert's program for a complete and consistent foundation of mathematics.

He emigrated to the United States in 1940, joining the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he became a close friend of Albert Einstein. He produced further work on the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis, on rotating-universe solutions to general relativity, and on philosophy of mathematics. Plagued by paranoia and a fear of poisoning, he refused food in his final months and died of self-starvation on January 14, 1978, in Princeton, aged 71.

The name Kurt is a German masculine given name, a short form of Konrad, meaning "bold counsel," which suited his bold rethinking of logic.