Journey To The Edge Of Reason

A remarkable account of Kurt Gödel, weaving together creative genius, mental illness, political corruption, and idealism in the face of the turmoil of war and upheaval. At age 24, a brilliant Austrian-born mathematician published a mathematical result that shook the world. Nearly a hundred years after Kurt Gödel's famous 1931 paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions appeared, his proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true - yet never provable within that system - continues to pose profound questions for mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and artificial intelligence. His close friend Albert Einstein, with whom he would walk home every day from Princeton's famous Institute for Advanced Study, called him the greatest logician since Aristotle. He was also a man who felt profoundly out of place in his time, rejecting the entire current of 20th century philosophical thought in his belief that mathematical truths existed independent of the...