A genius of the original order, a vulnerable human being racked by debilitating bouts of delusion and chronic paranoia, a reticent mind capable of cutting-edge output, and a soul ravaged by insecurities, Kurt Gödel represented a paradox to flummox all paradoxes. The Austrian American mathematician of eviscerating brilliance, once described by Albert Einstein as the greatest logician since Aristotle, lived a chequered life alternating between incandescence and incoherence. Stephen Budiansky in his splendid biography brings to life the extraordinary life of this tortured virtuoso.
Born in 1906, in Brünn (now Brno in the Czech Republic), Gödel was assimilated into the teeming and pulsating microcosm representing the Habsburg Empire with a predominant Viennese influence. Following University studies, Gödel was motivated by the eclectic Vienna Circle, a group of elite philosophers and scientists specialising in both natural and social sciences in addition to logic and mathematics. This circle met frequently at the University of Vienna, under the able stewardship of Moritz Schlick. Schlick’s subsequent assassination at the hands of a bipolar schizophrenic student left a permanent scar in the psyche of Gödel.
This unassuming Mathematician shot into worldwide prominence with the publication of a paper proving the postulations of mathematicians Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert wrong. Now universally known as the Incompleteness Theorem, Gödel’s paper proposed that for any finite mathematical system, there would always exist statements that are true but that are unproveable. The Incompleteness Theorem also resoundingly concluded that no system could demonstrate its own consistency.
While Gödel was busy upending received wisdom in the field of Mathematics, the world was in the throes of the greatest calamity that would soon engulf the twentieth Century. Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were threatening to envelope the world in a miasma of blood and gore. Despite fervent pleas from imminent academic luminaries such as John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, who had earlier and preemptively sought refuge in the United States, Gödel remained blissfully oblivious to the dire and existential threat that was staring him in the face. Only a last-minute scramble resulted in Gödel escaping the clutches of the Nazis and making his way to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton via a two-month journey that took him from Vienna to Russia and Japan before depositing him in America.
Gödel almost jeopardised the chances of his citizenship by claiming to the Judge overseeing his citizenship application, that he had found a logical inconsistency in the United States Constitution that would enable the establishment of a dictatorship should any intrepid soul aspire to so attempt. Only a timely intervention by his sponsor, Einstein and his friend Morgenstern prevented undesirable consequences.
But all along, Gödel was racked by devastating bouts of paranoia. Worrying that refrigerators supplied to his house would emit noxious fumes to kill him, he began discarding fridges from his dwelling. He also stopped eating fearing that a group of mathematicians were intent on killing him by poisoning his food. His wife Adele had to spoon feed him to demonstrate that the food was perfectly edible. When he was not suffering from such episodes of insanity, Gödel was as sharp as a razor in his thinking. Einstein noted that the walk that he took every day from his house to Princeton and back, in the company of Gödel, marked some of the most invigorating spells in Einstein’s life. Gödel could talk on any topic and offer contrarian views to the opinion of Einstein.
The deaths of Einstein, von Neumann and Morgenstern affected Gödel deeply and when Adele was herself hospitalized on account of illness, Gödel began starving literally. Adele discharged herself from the hospital peremptorily to check on her husband. What she found shocked her to the bones. Gödel had become skeletal in appearance & was visibly dying. On the 14th of January 1978, Gödel died in a hospital curled in a fetal position. He weighed a paltry twenty-nine kilograms, and the cause of death was stated to be “malnutrition and inanition secondary to personality disturbance.”
Steve Budiansky, with this book has done a yeoman service to revive the memory and magic of one of the greatest mathematicians to have ever lived. It would be an unpardonable travesty if the storied albeit checkered life of Kurt Gödel were to be relegated to a mere footnote in the history of science and progress.