Kurt Godel was born in 1906, and was such a tenacious child that his family referred to him as “Mr. Why” by the time he entered grade school. He made rather amazing contributions to the field of logic and mathematics over the course of his career. Einstein remarked that his greatest pleasures late in life were the daily conversations he shared with Godel, someone, it appears, he considered an intellectual equal. Godel provided Einstein with a mathematical solution to the field equations of general relatively, which he provided to Einstein at his 70th birthday. It was Einstein who helped him obtain a position at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Godel believed that his proofs confirmed Platonism, according his biographer, Wang, but he never published a formal proof of that assertion. He was known as an idiosyncratic person, and appeared to have starved himself to death in 1978 over a general paranoia of food. Irrespective of his personal oddities, his genius at logic has earned accolades that he was the greatest logician since Aristotle. The most relevant of his proofs for this discussion are the Incompleteness Theorems, which will be the subject of the next entries. These theorems, and indeed Godel and his work in general, were made part of public knowledge with Hoffstadter’s “Godel, Escher & Bach.”
