Kurt Friedrich Gödel | Biography

Gödel was born in an Austro-Hungarian province that is now part of the Czech Republic. His father was a textile manufacturer who had worked his way up from laborer to manager in the local factory. Kurt lived in a well-to-do household and had a happy childhood, though he was shy and introverted. He acquired the nickname of "Herr Warum" ("Mr. Why") because of his continual questions.

The town of Brunn (now Brno) where he grew up was spared the horrors of World War I, but when Czechoslovakia officially became a nation in 1918, the German-speaking minority there, of which Gödel's family was part, became isolated from the rest of the country. Ultimately, this forced Gödel to renounce his Czechoslovakian citizenship and become an Austrian. He attended the University of Vienna and studied science, philosophy, and mathematics.

In 1930 Gödel received a doctorate after defending his dissertation on the subject of formal logic systems and their relation to mathematics. His intense interest in this subject occurred at a time when only a few decades earlier other mathematicians, such as David Hilbert and Bertrand Russell, were putting the final touches on what seemed to be a well-constructed theory of the foundational logic that governed all of mathematics. The year after he received his degree, Gödel ended such attempts to demonstrate mathematical systems by self-consistent logic. In 1931 Gödel presented a devastating proof that all formal systems generate inconsistent or paradoxical mathematical statements that cannot be decided upon using the rules that govern that particular formal system. In essence, one has to go "outside" the formal rules to resolve certain problems of any axiom-based mathematics.

Gödel's discovery has had a great impact, even today, on the development of the theory of artificial intelligence. Gödel's incompleteness theorem, as it was called, has been seized upon by many philosophers as a proof of the metaphysical superiority of intuition over rigorous mathematical logic. But for Gödel the discovery was just one small result of his research. Though he was presented numerous awards during his life for his work, he never coveted acclaim or reward. He was always a shy and unassuming man.

When the Nazi party came to power and annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel was so mistreated by them that he and his wife immigrated to the United States. At the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (New Jersey), Gödel became friends with Albert Einstein and helped elucidate many features of the general theory of relativity. As Gödel aged, his tendency to hypochondria and mental instability increased. Fearing that his food was poisoned, Gödel starved himself in 1978 and died of malnutrition in a New Jersey hospital.