Logical Dilemmas

Mathematician Kurt Godel (1906-1978), familiar to readers of Douglas Hofstadter's bestseller Godel, Escher, Bach, put supreme faith in the unlimited power of rational inquiry, yet paradoxically, his famous incompleteness theorem holds that no single axiomatic system can yield all arithmetic truths. The tension between Godel's scientific rationalism and his personal instability is ably explored in this solid biography. An anorexic and reclusive hypochondriac given to depression and periods of paranoid breakdown, he died of starvation in the grip of an obsessive fear of being poisoned. Born in the Czech city of Brno (then part of Austria-Hungary) to ethnic German parents, Godel did his best work in Vienna, where he remained apolitical despite Austria's slide into a pro-Nazi fascist police state. Viewed with distrust by the Nazis because his mentor and many of his professors were Jewish, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1940 with his wife, Adele Porkert, lecturing at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he befriended Einstein. Godel believed in an afterlife, telepathy, ESP and the possibility of time travel. Providing an incisive introduction to his work in logic, mathematics and cosmology, this rigorous biography by Pennsylvania State University logician Dawson will primarily interest mathematicians, serious students and historians of science. Photos. (Nov.)