Kurt Godel was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of the Czech Republic, to a father who owned a textile factory and had a fondness for logic and reason and a mother who believed in starting her son’s education early. By age 10, Godel was studying math, religion and several languages. By 25 he had produced what many consider the most important result of 20th century mathematics: his famous “incompleteness theorem.” Godel’s astonishing and disorienting discovery, published in 1931, proved that nearly a century of effort by the world’s greatest mathematicians was doomed to failure. To appreciate Godel’s theorem, it is crucial to understand how mathematics was perceived at the time. After many centuries of being a typically sloppy human mishmash in which vague intuitions and precise logic coexisted on equal terms, mathematics at the end of the 19th century was finally being shaped up. So-called formal systems were devised
