4. The Great Logician Who Starved Himself to Death
Austrian-American philosopher and mathematician Kurt Godel (1906 – 1978) is considered to be in Aristotle’s league, as one of history’s greatest logicians. He is best known for his Incompleteness Theorem, one of the 20th century’s most significant mathematical results, which posits that within any axiomatic mathematical system, there are propositions which can be neither proved nor disproved based on that system’s axioms. It made him an intellectual celebrity, and he befriended Einsten, and taught at Princeton. Unfortunately, Godel’s brilliance was marred by a severe paranoia that wrecked his life, and eventually caused his death.
At age 6, he came down with rheumatic fever, which left him sickly for the remainder of his childhood, and with a lifelong preoccupation with his health that grew into hypochondria, and eventually, full blown paranoia. He eventually came to suffer from persecutory delusion that left him with an irrational fear of getting poisoned. Thus, he would only eat food that his wife had prepared for him and then tasted first. When his wife was hospitalized for six months in 1977 and was unable to prepare his food, he refused to eat and starved to death – he was down to 65 pounds by the time he died.
