Having a privileged mind and a capacity superior to that of most mortals does not exempt you from being a victim of serious mental problems. A good example of this is found in the Austrian mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel, born in Brno, the capital of Moravia, in 1906, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I, the region was annexed to Czechoslovakia, which was a problem for Gödel since his family, like a large part of the city’s population, was German-speaking. That led him to go into exile in Vienna and apply for Austrian citizenship. At the age of 32, with the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich, his nationality became German.
He found his vocation in a lecture by the mathematician David Hilbert (Königsberg, 1862-1943) on the consistency of mathematical fields and decided to devote the rest of his life to studying logic. This is where his greatest contributions come from: the two incompleteness theorems, published a year after his doctoral thesis, defended in Vienna in 1931. His contributions have been basic in developing logic, with numerous applications in later years in the field of mathematics and software engineering.
But political hazards continued to influence his life. Gödel was from a Catholic family and never showed interest in politics. However, one of his teachers was killed by a Nazi, which affected him greatly. With the annexation of Austria, his position as a university professor had to be re-examined, and he assumed that his friendship and relationship with many Jewish scientists from the Vienna Circle would weigh heavily against him at his trial, apart from the fact that at any moment he could be mobilized by the German Army. In 1940 he and his wife fled from Vienna with the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, from there they crossed into Japan and from the Japanese country they sailed to San Francisco (the world war had already started in Europe, but Japan would not attack the United States until December of the year 1941). Once in California, he crossed the entire United States by train until he arrived at Princeton University, in New Jersey, where he carried out the rest of his scientific career.
JM Mulet is Professor of Biotechnology.
The illogical final chapter
— Gödel’s sad end was due to his worsening mental state. In 1938 he had married, against the will of his parents, the divorced ballerina Adele Pokert, eight years his senior, with whom he remained his entire life. He developed the persecution mania that they wanted to poison him, so he would not accept any food that had not been cooked by Adele. In 1977, his wife was hospitalized for six months. Kurt Gödel died in January 1978 from severe malnutrition, since he had refused to eat any food. He weighed 30 kilos. The great master of logic died for behavior beyond all logic.
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