Kurt Gödel

Kurt Friedrich Gödel was born on April 28, 1906, in Brno, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in the Czech Republic. He grew up in a prosperous family and showed a keen interest in mathematics and philosophy from childhood. He studied at the University of Vienna, where he came into contact with the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who advocated logical positivism, though Gödel's own views ultimately diverged from theirs.

In 1931, at the age of 25, Gödel published his incompleteness theorems, results that would permanently alter the field of mathematical logic. The first incompleteness theorem states that in any consistent formal system powerful enough to describe basic arithmetic, there exist statements that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system. The second theorem states that such a system cannot prove its own consistency. These results refuted the program advanced by David Hilbert to establish a complete and consistent foundation for all of mathematics.

Gödel completed his doctorate at Vienna in 1930 and his habilitation in 1932. He made several visits to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the 1930s, where he met Albert Einstein, with whom he developed a close and lasting friendship. In 1940, fleeing the political situation in Europe following the annexation of Austria by Germany, Gödel and his wife Adele emigrated to the United States, travelling eastward via the Trans-Siberian Railway and across the Pacific.

Gödel joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton permanently in 1940, becoming a full professor there in 1953. In 1949 he published a solution to the field equations of general relativity that describes a rotating universe in which closed time-like curves are possible, a contribution to theoretical physics known as the Gödel metric.

In 1948 Gödel became a United States citizen; Einstein and the economist Oskar Morgenstern accompanied him to his citizenship examination, reportedly to prevent him from inadvertently arguing with the examining judge over a logical inconsistency he believed he had found in the US Constitution.

In his later years Gödel suffered from increasing paranoia and anxiety. He became convinced he might be poisoned and refused to eat food that had not been prepared by his wife. After Adele was hospitalised in 1977, he ate virtually nothing. Kurt Gödel died on January 14, 1978, in Princeton, New Jersey, of malnutrition caused by self-starvation.