Born on April 28, 1906, in Brno, Moravia, Gödel was the second of two children of Rudolf and Marianne Gödel, expatriate Germans whose families were associated with the city’s textile industry.
The Circle brought Gödel into contact with scholars such as philosopher of science Rudolf Carnap and mathematician Karl Menger and helped to acquaint him with the literature of mathematical logic and philosophy.
During this period, Gödel suddenly acquired international stature in mathematical logic.
As Norwegian logician Thoralf Skolem demonstrated a few years after Gödel’s work, even if all statements that are true of the natural numbers are taken as axioms, there will still be other structures, essentially different from the natural numbers, that also satisfy the axioms.
Extensions of Gödel’s ideas have allowed the derivation of several results about the limits of computational procedures.
This article was adapted from Gödel and the limits of logic by JW Dawson.
Trained as a logician, during the years 1982–84 he catalogued Gödel’s papers at the Institute for Advanced Study, work that provided the basis for his 1997 biography Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel.
Source: Gödel and the limits of logic
Originally published at Cogly.
