Kurt Gödel, 1906-1978

Kurt Gödel was born in 1906 in Brunn, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now the Czech Republic. His father owned a textile factory and had a fondness for logic and reason. His mother believed in starting her son's education early, and by age 10, Gödel was studying math, religion and several languages. By 25 he had produced what many consider the most important result of 20th century mathematics: his famous "incompleteness theorem." Gödel's astonishing and disorienting discovery, published in 1931, proved that nearly a century of effort by the world's greatest mathematicians was doomed to failure.

In 1939, he and his wife Adele, a dancer, fled the Nazis and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked with Einstein. Kurt Gödel was professor at the Institute for Advance Study for many years. He was a co-recipient of the Einstein Award in 1951.

In his later years Gödel grew paranoid about the spread of germs, and he became notorious for compulsively cleaning his eating utensils and wearing ski masks with eye holes wherever he went. He died at age 72 in the Princeton hospital, essentially because he refused to eat.