Journey to the Edge of Reason

Starred review from March 29, 2021
Historian Budiansky (Oliver Wendell Holmes) recaps the revolutionary work of mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) in this probing biography. Budiansky details how Gödel showed the limits of logic in math with his work, and sailed past those limits in his delusions, outlining Gödel’s theories on the most abstract of questions along the way. Most notable is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which proved in the early 1930s that every mathematical system contains statements that are true yet not provable; this refuted fashionable “positivist” philosophical arguments that all truths could be found by empirical observation. Budiansky situates Gödel’s work in a vivid panorama of his intellectual circle in Vienna between the wars, and explores the metaphysical conclusions Gödel drew from it—a Platonist belief that ideas have an independent existence, and that there is a spiritual order to the universe. Budiansky’s account of Gödel’s later years at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study shows the logician’s passion for unprovable truths souring into paranoia, including a persistent conviction that his food was poisoned (his wife sometimes had to taste it to demonstrate otherwise), and he ultimately starved himself to death. Budiansky keeps things accessible—an appendix, for example, explains Gödel’s proofs concisely­—and Gödel comes through as a brilliant though tragic figure in Budiansky’s richly descriptive prose. This captivating portrait of a great if neurotic mind hits the mark . Photos.

Starred review from April 15, 2021
Co-recipient of the Albert Einstein Award in 1951, Kurt G�del was a close companion of the genius for whom the award was named. However, the brilliant mathematician who walked by Einstein's side through the streets of Princeton, NJ, has only now received the biographical attention he deserves. Budiansky exposes the social and political influences that shaped the life of this brilliant Austrian mathematician, illuminating particularly the dramatic events that caused him to flee a country losing its soul to Nazi barbarians to join Einstein in the exclusive Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. But Budiansky's greater accomplishment is that of penetrating a mind that reoriented the entire mathematical world with the famous incompleteness theorems. Readers come to understand why, while others interpreted G�del's theorems as a devastating blow to mathematical ambitions, G�del himself interpreted them as a guarantee that the human spirit could forever explore Platonic truth. Readers also learn about G�del's impressive but less-well-known breakthroughs in understanding infinity and advancing computer science. Finally, it is not Budiansky's mathematical acumen but rather his emotional empathy that carries readers into the brilliant theorist's fatal descent into the depression and paranoia that cause irrational self-starvation. A portrait remarkable both for its intellectual depth and for its compassion.

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Starred review from March 1, 2021
One of the great geniuses of the 20th century, barely known outside academia today, receives a much-needed expert biographical treatment. Regarding his subject, Kurt G�del (1906-1978), Budiansky writes, "Einstein had called him 'the greatest logician since Aristotle, ' and even in Princeton, that town with more Nobel Prize winners than traffic lights, his otherworldly genius had stood out." Born to a prosperous family in Austria-Hungary, G�del was brilliant from the start. He entered the University of Vienna in 1924 to study physics but became attracted to mathematics and philosophy. During the 1920s, Vienna was a world center for both disciplines, and G�del's talents were quickly recognized. Many readers are unaware that nothing in science is proven. The law of gravity states that things fall down only because things always fall down. No proof exists that they can't fall up. Only mathematics produces absolute proofs. Mathematicians find this deeply satisfying, but they are still recovering from the shock of G�del's great discovery, in the early 1930s, that many systems in mathematics, while true, can't be proven. Although a historic milestone, it's an exceedingly difficult concept; readers with some background in college mathematics will be best-suited to comprehending the author's explanations. Fortunately, Budiansky writes so well that this is no problem. Although G�del remains the focus of this terrific book, the author delivers insightful portraits of a score of brilliant men and women, almost all German or Austrian, descriptions of their work and academic struggles in early-20th-century Europe, and their lives after Hitler destroyed German science. Many moved to the U.S., where they encountered a land of Eden, especially Princeton, "a picturesque pre-Revolutionary village attached to the university campus." Barely escaping Vienna in 1940, G�del settled at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, became a close friend of Einstein, and continued groundbreaking work despite increasing periods of obsession and paranoid delusion, which eventually led to his death via slow starvation. An outstanding biography of a man of incomprehensible brilliance.

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