Kurt Gödel

In 1927, Kurt Gödel met Adele Nimbursky (née Porkert) at a night club, where she was employed as a dancer. She was six years older to him and a divorcee. Although his family did not approve of the match, he married her on September 20, 1938, just before they left for the U.S.A.

Late in life he began to suffer from Persecutory delusions and feared of being poisoned. He did not take any food unless his wife prepared it.

Unfortunately, late in 1977, Adele was hospitalized for six months. During that period Gödel refused to eat. As the situation became alarming, he was admitted to Princeton Hospital, where he died on January 14, 1978. His death certificate stated that he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance".

Kurt Friedrich Gödel was born on April 28, 1906, in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic. At the time of his birth, it was a textile-producing city in the Austro-Hungarian province of Moravia and was known as Brünn.

His father, Rudolf Gödel, was initially a textile worker. Later, he became the manager and eventually the part owner of the Friedrich Redlich textile factory. His mother, Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh) was educated at a French institute; she had broad cultural interests.

Kurt was the younger of his parents’ two children. His elder brother, also named Rudolf, later became a radiologist in Vienna. Although his father was Catholic, he was baptized in his mother’s religion, a Lutheran and derived his middle name from his godfather Friedrich Redlich.

He had a very happy childhood. He was vey devoted to his mother and felt helpless when she was not around. He was also very inquisitive and kept on asking questions. Because of that, his family called him Herr Warum or Mr. Why.

However, from his childhood, he suffered from different ailments. At the age of five, he had a mild anxiety neurosis, but recovered completely from it. At six, he suffered from rheumatic fever. Although he recovered from this too, he became convinced that his heart had been damaged permanently.

However, when Kurt Gödel joined the University of Vienna in 1924, he took up theoretical physics as his major. Sometime before this, he had read Goethe’s theory of colors and became interest in the subject. At the same time, he attended classes on mathematics and philosophy as well.

Soon he came in contact with great mathematicians and in 1926, influenced by number theorist Philipp Furtwängler, he decided to change his subject and take up mathematics. Besides that, he was highly influenced by Karl Menger’s course in dimension theory and attended Heinrich Gomperz’s course in the history of philosophy.

Also in 1926, he entered the Vienna Circle, a group of positivist philosophers formed around Moritz Schlick, and until 1928, attended their meetings regularly. After graduation, he started working for his doctoral degree under Hans Hahn. His dissertation was on the problem of completeness.

In the summer of 1929, Gödel submitted his dissertation, titled ‘Über die Vollständigkeit des Logikkalküls’ (On the Completeness of the Calculus of Logic). Subsequently in February 1930, he received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Vienna. Sometime now, he also became an Austrian citizen.

Later in the same year, he published his dissertation in a slightly abridged form. The work established that all of the first-order logical truths can be proved in standard first-order proof systems. Thereafter, working further on the subject, he published his second paper on the same topic in January 1931.

As a Privatdozent, Kurt Gödel gave his first course on the foundations of arithmetic. He was an extremely shy person and gave his lectures facing the blackboard. During the seven years he spent at the university, he taught only two more courses.

Also in 1933, he was appointed a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, U.S.A. Accordingly, from February to May 1934, he gave a series of lectures titled ‘On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems’ at the IAS.

These lectures were noted down by young Stephen Cole Kleene, an American mathematician and later published in book form. Sometime now, Gödel also met Albert Einstein and established a life-long friendship.

In the mid-1930s, his mental health deteriorated and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Thereafter, he spent several months in a sanatorium receiving treatment for depression.

His bout of depression reappeared when in June 1936, German philosopher Moritz Schlick was murdered by a deranged student. Gödel again had to undergo treatment. Thus he could not return to his academic life until 1937.