Kurt Godel
'Established, beyond comparison, as the most important logician of our times.' - Soloman Feferman. Kurt Friedrich Gödel was born on April 28, 1906 in Brunn, Austria - Hungary and died of starvation on January 14, 1978. His father, Rudolf Gödel, Sr., was the managing director at a textile factory in Brunn. Here, he came to know Gustav Handschuh, whose daughter Marianne married Rudolf despite the fourteen year age difference. Together they had two sons, Rudolf Jr. and Kurt, both of whom became very successful men. Throughout his high school career, Gödel had outstanding remarks regarding his academics. His brother stated, '...in the whole of his time at high school not only was his work in Latin given top remark ... he made not a single grammatical error.' (O'Connor & Robertson) Gödel later went on to attend the University of Vienna in 1923. He was undecided on whether to study mathematics or theoretical physics. Gödel was the student of Furtwangler, Hahn, Wirtinger, Menger, Helly and many others. Furtwangler made an impact on him - not only because of his awe inspiring lectures - but because he was paralyzed from the neck down. Prior to meeting him, Gödel was highly concerned with his health from having rheumatic fever at a young age. He saw this as his sign to pursue mathematics. According to Gödel, mathematics is not a finished object. In 1929, he finished his thesis which proved the completeness of first order calculus. This launched the submission of his proof: “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems,” in 1931. His theory stated that, 'for any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system.' Hahn accepted his paper on this proof in 1932, which later lead to Gödel becoming a Privatdozent at the University. Gödel also made a formal argument that God exists. In his ontological proof, he had a fourteen point outline based on modal logic. A modal is essentially an expression