A Hypochondriac Philosopher
Kurt Godel (1906 – 1978) was an Austrian-American logician, philosopher, and mathematician considered to be in the same league as Aristotle as one of history’s greatest logicians. He is best known for his Incompleteness Theorem, one of the twentieth century’s most significant mathematical results. It posits that within any axiomatic mathematical system, there are propositions which can be neither proved nor disproved based on that system’s axioms. Godel was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic.
At age six, Godel endured a bout with rheumatic fever, an inflammatory heart disease, which left him sickly for the remainder of his childhood. The rheumatic fever bout also left him with a lifelong concern about his health that grew into hypochondria, As seen below, it eventually became a full blown paranoia that did him in. Brilliant since childhood, by 1929 he had graduated from the University of Vienna, an intellectual hub of the world in those days. He joined its faculty a year later. His brilliance, however, was marred by paranoia. It kept him at a distance from the university’s other brilliant minds, and left him convinced that the twentieth century as a whole was hostile to him.
