Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906 – 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He was considered to be one of the most significant logicians in history. In 1929, for a doctoral dissertation, he developed his Incompleteness Theorems, considered among the most important results in modern logic. They were published in 1931.
Nothing was ever quite the same again.
“Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems … proved that any set of axioms you could suggest as a possible foundation for maths will inevitably be incomplete.
There will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms.
Godel also showed that:
No set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.
His theorems meant that:
“There can be no mathematical theory of everything,
no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.”
REFERENCES: “Kurt Godel,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020.
“Kurt Godel” Wikipedia.
Natalie Wolchover (2020), “How Godel’s Proof Works” Qanta Magazine.
FEATURED IMAGE: A proof of Goedel’s second incompleteness theorem in GL logic via Wikipedia
The Absent Answer 
