Kurt Gödel

Also known as Kurt Friedrich Gödel

Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics (1906-1978)

OverviewAI-generated

Kurt Gödel was born on April 28, 1906, and died on January 14, 1978. He is recognized in the Royal Society collection and the American Academy Arts Sciences collection. His works are included in the Open Library, which lists 22 works by him. Top works include *Obras completas*, *Mathematical Logic in Vienna*, *Urber dia vollständigkeit des logikkalküls*, *Kurt Gödel papers, 1905-1980*, and *Maximen VI / Maxims VI*.

Crossref lists five works by Gödel. He has an Erdős number of 3. On Last.fm, the artist Kurt Gödel has 6 listeners and a playcount of 10. His ACM Classification Code is 10011419. He is referenced by 1,309 other encyclopedia articles.

Quotes attributed to him include: "But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err.", "Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine.", and "I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded."

Synthesized by Vinony from 17 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Crossref, Wikiquote, Open Library, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Given name: Kurt
Gender: male
Citizenship: Czechoslovakia
Place of birth: Brno
Place of death: Princeton
Occupation: physicist
Educated at: University of Vienna
Employer: Institute for Advanced Study
Languages spoken: English language
Native language: German
Religion: Christianity
Doctoral advisor: Hans Hahn
Student of: Philipp Furtwängler
Field of work: philosophy of mathematics
Image: 1925 kurt gödel.png
Work location: Brno
Residence: Austria

Show 16 more facts

Commons category: Kurt Gödel
cause of death: starvation
member of: American Philosophical Society
date of birth: 1906-04-28
date of death: 1978-01-14
Erdős number: 3
Commons gallery: Kurt Gödel
name in native language: Kurt Friedrich Gödel
topic's main category: Category:Kurt Gödel
ACM Classification Code (2012): 10011419
writing language: German
manner of death: Suicide
P8168: Tamar
birth name: Kurt Friedrich Gödel
on focus list of Wikimedia project: Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
maintained by WikiProject: WikiProject Mathematics

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Encyclopedic overview

Kurt Friedrich Gödel (/ˈɡɜːrdəl/ GUR-dəl; German: [ˈkʊʁt ˈɡøːdl̩] ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel profoundly influenced scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century (at a time when Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics), building on earlier work by Frege, Richard Dedekind, and Georg Cantor.

Gödel's discoveries in the foundations of mathematics led to the proof of his completeness theorem in 1929 as part of his dissertation to earn a doctorate at the University of Vienna, and the publication of Gödel's incompleteness theorems two years later, in 1931. The incompleteness theorems address limitations of formal axiomatic systems. In particular, they imply that a formal axiomatic system satisfying certain technical conditions cannot decide the truth value of all statements about the natural numbers, and cannot prove that it is itself consistent. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Kurt Gödel” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.