An early December 1947, a thin man in his early forties appeared before Phillip Forman, Judge of the US District Court in Trenton, New Jersey, to take the naturalization test to obtain American citizenship. Seven years and eleven months earlier, he had literally escaped Hitler’s Reich on the last train, fled to America via the Soviet Union and the Pacific, and was now working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The judge asked him where he was from. “Austria,” he replied, to which Forman asked what form of government there was. “It was a republic, but the constitution was such that the country ultimately turned into a dictatorship.” That’s really bad, said Judge Forman, something like that could never happen here in the United States. “Oh yes,” replied the naturalization candidate: “I can prove it.”
Kurt Gödel became an American anyway. The judge tactfully ignored his claim, which probably had something to do with the two friends and institute colleagues who accompanied Godel to Trenton at the time. One was the economist Oskar Morgenstern and the other Albert Einstein, who knew Forman from his own naturalization process a few years earlier. Einstein and Gödel were two people who couldn’t have been more different. But what they had in common – in addition to the high esteem for each other – was the fact that they had achieved what are probably the two most important individual scientific achievements of the twentieth century: In 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of relativity, which allows space and time to be understood as objects of spatiotemporal changes. And Gödel proved in 1931 the existence of unprovable, but nonetheless true – i.e. irrefutable – mathematical propositions by formulating statements about mathematical propositions themselves as mathematical propositions.
What was Godel like as a person?
With their self-referential insights, Einstein and Gödel had lastingly shaken the scientific world views of their respective disciplines. But while Einstein quickly became a cult figure, Gödel remained largely unknown outside of specialist circles until his death in January 1978. And so Einstein biographies fill entire shelves today, but there is a standard work on Gödel by the American mathematician John Dawson, published in 1996, who had access to Gödel’s estate in Princeton, but from the complete edition of his philosophical notebooks, written in Gabelsberger shorthand, by the Philosophy professor Eva-Maria Engelen only published the first volume at the end of 2019 (FAZ from June 11, 2021). This is one of the reasons why a comprehensive biography of Kurt Gödel that satisfies the demands of the history of science is still lacking to this day.
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