Kurt Godel

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American mathematician and logician, widely considered one of the most significant logicians in history.

His incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, demonstrated that any consistent formal system capable of expressing basic arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proved within that system—a result that transformed mathematics and philosophy.

Gödel later contributed to set theory and, improbably, to cosmology, proposing solutions to Einstein's field equations that permitted closed timelike curves.

He spent his final decades at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, increasingly reclusive and paranoid, eventually dying of self-starvation in 1978.