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Kurt Gödel (1906 - 1978)
Kurt Gödel was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of the Czech Republic.
By age 10, Gödel was studying math, religion and several
languages. By 25 he had produced what many consider the most important
result of 20th century mathematics: his famous "incompleteness
theorem."
With the outbreak of World War II, Kurt Gödel decided to leave
Vienna. He emigrated to the United States in 1940, and joined the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1953 until his death in
1978.
Incompleteness Theorems
Gödel's
main field was logic and the foundations of mathematics, and in
this field he is best known for his two incompleteness theorems. The
first of them showed that axiomatic systems, like Euclid's exemplary
system for geometry, could never capture all the truths of
arithmetic. The second showed that the consistency of such a system
could never be proved by reasoning inside the system.
Alan Turing later provided a constructive
interpretation of Godel's results by placing them on an algorithmic
foundation: There are numbers and functions that cannot be computed by
any logical machine.
Links:
Very Complete Biography
Short Biography
Time
Goedel and God
Theorem and Prove
Theorem and Prove
Theorem and Prove
Theorem and Prove