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Kurt Friedrich Gödel (b. 1906, d. 1978) was one of the principal founders of the modern, metamathematical era in mathematical logic. Gödel is known for his Incompleteness Theorems and much of his work stimulated and had relevance to mathematical logic. In philosophy, Gödel formulated and defended mathematical Platonism, the view that mathematics is a descriptive science or the view that the concept of mathematical truth is objective. Platonists believe mathematics is s set of truths discovered by human reason, which is in contrast to constructivists which believe mathematics is the invention of the human mind. Kurt Gödel is known to have written to John von Neumann about a problem now known as the “P versus NP” question, which asks if P (problems we can easily solve) is equal to NP (problems that we can easily check).
Kurt Gödel was born in 1906 in Brünn, then an Austro-Hungarian city now known as Brno in the Czech Republic. Gödel and his wife Adele emigrated to the United States in 1940. At his U.S. citizenship, Gödel informed the judge that he discovered an inconsistency in the Constitution that would allow a dictator to rise in America. Gödel became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, where he remained until retirement in 1976. There he had a close friendship with Albert Einstein. From about 1943 Gödel became involved in the study of philosophy.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is described by Siobhan Roberts in the New Yorker, as a theorem that used mathematics to prove that mathematics could not prove all mathematics. Another statement about the theorem by novelist Zia Haider Rahman is “Within any given system, there are claims which are true but which cannot be proven to be true.”
A year after Gödel’s death, the book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter was published that makes a connection between the music of Bach, the drawings of MC Escher and Gödel’s "First Incompleteness Theorem" through the notion of a “strange loop”. The book won a Pulitzer prize in 1980.
Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM SIGACT) sponsor the Gödel Prize ($5000 US), for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science. It is an annual award presented alternately at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP) and ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC).