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Biography
Influences
Achievements and Awards
Publications of Importance
Inventions or Contributions to Knowledge
Other Areas of Interest
Internet Links of Significance
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Kurt Gê¶del was born on April 28, 1906 in Austria-Hungary, the city of Brno (now Czech Republic). Although he is commonly considered Austrian, there are quite a few countries listed in his biography. After the breakup of Austria-Hungary, Gê¶del became Czechoslovak citizen at age 12, and Austrian citizen at age 23. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gê¶del automatically became German. After the World War II, Gê¶del obtained US citizenship. He died on January 14, 1978 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
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Gê¶del is arguably the greatest mathematician of the 20th century and one of the three greatest logicians of all time, with the other two being Aristotle and Frege. His incompleteness theorems, revealing the fundamental limitations of formal reasoning, had a great impact on the further development of not only logic and mathematics, but philosophy and theoretical computer science as well. This result was devastating to a philosophical approach to mathematics known as Hilbert's program, which was based on a conviction that the consistency of more complicated systems, such as real analysis, could be proven in terms of simpler systems.
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Fellow of the Royal Society. Elected 1968.
AMS Gibbs Lecturer. 1951.
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Gê¶del, Kurt. On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems. Translated by B. Meltzer, with an introduction by R. B. Braithwaite Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York 1963 viii+72 pp.
Gê¶del, Kurt. êœber eine bisher noch nicht benê¼tzte Erweiterung des finiten Standpunktes. (German) Dialectica 12 1958 280--287.
Gê¶del, Kurt. An example of a new type of cosmological solutions of Einstein's field equations of gravitation. Rev. Modern Physics 21, (1949). 447--450.
Gê¶del, Kurt. What is Cantor's continuum problem? Amer. Math. Monthly 54, (1947). 515--525.
Gê¶del, Kurt. The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis. Annals of Mathematics Studies, no. 3. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J., 1940. 66 pp.
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Gê¶del is most famous for his Incompleteness Theorems. He is also the author of the Completeness Theorem for classical first-order logic. Amond his other contributions is celebrated work on the Continuum hypothesis, showing that it cannot be disproven from the accepted set theory axioms, assuming that those axioms are consistent.
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