Kurt Gödel

The foremost mathematical logician of the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel was associated with the Institute for Advanced Study from his first visit in the academic year 1933–34, until his death in 1978. He was Professor in the School of Mathematics from 1953 until 1976, when he became Professor Emeritus. Among Gödel’s most famous results are his Incompleteness Theorems, which show that in any consistent axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the system and that the consistency of the axioms themselves cannot be proved. Additionally, Gödel published proofs of the relative consistency of the axiom of choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis (1938, 1940), which strongly influenced the (later) discovery that a computer can never be programmed to answer all mathematical questions.