Kurt Gödel

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Kurt Gödel at Institute for Advanced Study

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was an Austrian-born mathematician who is considered perhaps the greatest logician since Aristotle. His Incompleteness Theorem was a stunning proof of limitations on logic, at a time when leading mathematicians were working diligently to establish its completeness. He immigrated to the United States and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, and is buried in that town with his wife. Gödel was a devout Christian who believed in an afterlife and read the Bible regularly.[1] He completely rejected the atheism of the Vienna Circle to which he was introduced.

Gödel was ostracized from academia despite his immense intellectual achievements, and was never offered a tenure-track position of professor.[2] He worked on developing a logical proof of God that build on the ontological proof by Saint Anselm. Politically, he supported Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and was critical of the Democrat Harry Truman.[3]



Gödel took set theory, as originally developed by Georg Cantor, to new heights, as explained by Boston University Professors Juliet Floyd and Akihiro Kanamori in "How Gödel Transformed Set Theory":

How Gödel transformed set theory can be broadly cast as follows: On the larger stage, from the time of Cantor, sets began making their way into topology, algebra, and analysis so that by the time of Gödel, they were fairly entrenched in the structure and language of mathematics. But how were sets viewed among set theorists, those investigating sets as such? Before Gödel, the main concerns were what sets are and how sets and their axioms can serve as a reductive basis for mathematics. Even today, those preoccupied with ontology, questions of mathematical existence, focus mostly upon the set theory of the early period. After Gödel, the main concerns became what sets do and how set theory is to advance as an autonomous field of mathematics.[4]







  1. https://www.quora.com/What-led-Kurt-G%C3%B6del-to-become-a-Christian
  2. Gödel was offered only an unpaid lecturer position after he published his breakthrough papers.
  3. https://www.usna.edu/Users/math/meh/godel.html
  4. www.ams.org/notices/200604/fea-kanamori.pdf
  5. http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/the-gdel-letter/