Thinkers Timeline

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He is widely considered the greatest logician of the 20th century. His incompleteness theorems changed how mathematicians and philosophers understand the foundations of mathematics. He was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Brno in the Czech Republic). His parents were ethnic Germans living in a mostly Czech city. His father managed a textile factory. The family was comfortable. Young Kurt was a quiet, curious child. He asked so many questions that his family nicknamed him 'Mr. Why'. He suffered through a serious illness with rheumatic fever at age six, which he believed had permanently damaged his heart, even though doctors found no lasting damage. The belief shaped his fearful approach to his own health for the rest of his life. He studied at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. He attended the famous Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met to discuss the foundations of knowledge. He earned his doctorate in mathematics in 1929. The next year, he proved his most famous result, the incompleteness theorems. He was 24. In the 1930s, the rise of Nazism made Vienna dangerous. Gödel was not Jewish but had Jewish friends and colleagues. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 and the start of World War II, he and his wife Adele fled to America. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein also worked. The two became close friends. Gödel did important later work in cosmology and philosophy. He died in 1978 of malnutrition. He had become so paranoid about poisoning that he stopped eating after his wife was hospitalised.