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Brief Lives

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)

Alistair MacFarlane shows how the life of this logician reached beyond pure logic.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, like Einstein’s Relativity Theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, fundamentally changed the way we look at the world. Described by Bryan Appleyard as “one of the most profoundly shocking or exhilarating statements in twentieth-century thought,” the Incompleteness Theorem strikes a deep and resonant chord in philosophy because it says something fundamental about the limitations of logic, and also about mathematics, computers and science. Hence many people want to know something about the man and his theorem. What makes this popular interest in Gödel extraordinary, is that his original paper on the theorem, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of ‘Principia Mathematica’ and Related Systems (1931) is so inaccessible. Its formidable difficulty is such that neither Bertrand Russell nor Ludwig Wittgenstein were able to follow its argument in the original undiluted form.

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