Some facts about Kurt Gödel

Abstract

The text of this article was done together with Gödel in 1976 to 1977 and was approved by him at that time. The footnotes and section headings have been added much later. Gödel was born on April 28, 1906 at Brno (or Brünn in German), Czechoslovakia (at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy). After completing secondary school there, he went, in 1924, to Vienna to study physics at the University. His interest in precision led him from physics to mathematics and to mathematical logic. He enjoyed much the lectures by Furtwangler on number theory and developed an interest in this subject which was, for example, relevant to his application of the Chinese remainder theorem in expressing primitive recursive functions in terms of addition and multiplication. In 1926 he transferred to mathematics and coincidentally became a member of the M. Schlick circle. However, he has never been a positivist, but accepted only some of their theses even at that time. Later on, he moved further and further away from them. He completed his formal studies at the University before the summer of 1929. He also attended during this period philosophical lectures by Heinrich Gomperz whose father was famous in Greek philosophy. At about this time he read the first edition of Hilbert-Ackermann (1928) in which the completeness of the (restricted) predicate calculus was formulated and posed as an open problem. Gödel settled this problem and wrote up the result as his doctoral dissertation which was finished and approved in the autumn of 1929. The degree was granted on February 6, 1930. A somewhat revised version of the dissertation was published in 1930 in the Monatshefte .