The Tragic End of a Brilliant Mind
After Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem was published, he became a celebrity within intellectual circles, and travelled to America many times in the 1930s. There, he met and befriended Albert Einstein, and began to lecture at Princeton University. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Godel’s friendship with Jewish intellectuals made him suspect. Between that and fear of conscription into the Wehrmacht, he fled to the US. There, with Einstein’s help, he got a position teaching at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, where he remained until his retirement in 1976.
Godel’s paranoia worsened as he aged, however, and he suffered bouts of mental instability. Key among them was a persecutory delusion that left him with an irrational fear of getting poisoned. As such, he would only eat food that his wife had prepared for him and then tasted first. When in 1977 she was hospitalized for six months and was unable to prepare his food, he refused to eat and literally starved to death. He was down to 65 pounds by the time he died.
