Best Known Modern Mathematician is not a hotly contested title. John Nash would get some votes, thanks to the movie A Beautiful Mind (a biopic about genius and madness). So, despite all the syllables, would Srinivasa Ramanujan: rose from obscurity, died young, biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity. But the likely winner of this low-turnout election is Kurt Gödel, about whom a commercially viable biopic is highly improbable. His name has reached the public partly through Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award for Science, and which, as I write this more than forty years after its publication, leads in three Amazon sales categories; and partly because his most celebrated discoveries, the Incompleteness Theorems, have not only fascinated serious thinkers but—like the Uncertainty Principle and the Theory of Relativity—have also furnished the overlapping genera of pop philosopher, trendy academic, and crank with what has been called “an inexhaustible source of intellectual abuse.”
Here is his life in bald outline: born 1906 in Brünn (now Brno, in the Czech Republic); studied mathematics in Vienna, and was invited into the famous Vienna Circle of philosophers; transformed mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics, 1929–39; barely escaped from the Nazis in 1940 (astonishingly impervious to his friends’ entreaties that he leave); spent the rest of his life at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, rarely straying far. By the mid-1940s his interests had become primarily philosophical, with