In the spring of 1933, Kurt Gödel sat in a Viennese coffee house and watched the world he had known dissolve around him. The Nazis had come to power in Germany, and the intellectual community of Central Europe, the world of cafes and seminars and late-night philosophical argument that had produced his most revolutionary work, was beginning to scatter. His closest colleague, Hans Hahn, was under threat. His mentor Moritz Schlick would be shot dead on the steps of the University of Vienna three years later by a former student who sympathized with the regime. Gödel himself, who had no interest in politics and could barely manage the ordinary demands of daily life, responded to the gathering catastrophe by having a complete mental breakdown. He was twenty-seven years old and had already produced the most important result in the history of mathematical logic. He spent several months in a sanatorium. When he recovered, he returned to his work as though nothing had happened, continuing to develop ideas about time, causality, and the nature of mathematical truth that would occupy him for the rest of his life. He would have two more breakdowns before finally fleeing to America in 1940, crossing the Soviet Union and the Pacific by ship because the Atlantic was too dangerous, arriving at Princeton with almost nothing except the contents of his mind. It was, by any measure, more than enough.
Best known for his Incompleteness Theorem, Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) is considered one of the most important mathematicians and logicians of the twentieth century. By showing that the establishment of a set of axioms encompassing all of mathematics would never succeed, he revolutionized the world of mathematics, logic, and philosophy in ways that are still being absorbed. His proof was not merely a technical result but a philosophical earthquake, demonstrating that within any sufficiently powerful formal system there exist true statements that cannot be proved within that system, and that the dream of a complete and consistent mathematical foundation, cherished by the greatest logical minds of the age, was not merely unachieved but unachievable. Einstein, who walked with Gödel daily during their years together at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said that he went to the Institute primarily for the privilege of walking home with him. It was perhaps the most generous tribute one genius ever paid another.
To make sense of Gödel's achievement and the paradoxes surrounding his life, a guide is needed who can move with equal fluency between mathematical logic and human drama. Rebecca Goldstein, author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, among many other awards for her fiction and scholarship, is precisely that guide. Her work combines philosophical rigor with biographical intimacy, illuminating the man and the mathematics with equal clarity and equal feeling.
In the conversation that follows, Goldstein guides us into Gödel's world, exploring the proof that changed everything, the mind that produced it, and the life that surrounded and ultimately overwhelmed it, asking what it means that the greatest logician of the twentieth century died because he could not trust the evidence of his own senses.
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