{"id":3285,"date":"2021-05-29T18:33:56","date_gmt":"2021-05-29T18:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3285"},"modified":"2021-07-05T16:53:40","modified_gmt":"2021-07-05T16:53:40","slug":"godel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3285","title":{"rendered":"Nothing happens without a reason"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt G\u00f6del by Stephen Budiansky for the Spectator, 29 May 2021<\/a><\/p>\n

The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt G\u00f6del did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz imagined it: a place of pre-established harmony, whose patterns are accessible to reason.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an optimistic world, and a theological one: a universe presided over by a God who does not play dice. It\u2019s most decidedly not a 20th-century world, but \u201cin any case\u201d, as G\u00f6del himself once commented, \u201cthere is no reason to trust blindly in the spirit of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

His fellow mathematician Paul Erd\u00f6s was appalled: \u201cYou became a mathematician so that people should study you,\u201d he complained, \u201cnot that you should study Leibnitz.\u201d But G\u00f6del always did prefer study to self-expression, and is this is chiefly why we know so little about him, and why the spectacular deterioration of his final years — a fantasmagoric tale of imagined conspiracies, strange vapours and shadowy intruders, ending in his self-starvation in 1978 — has come to stand for the whole of his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing, G\u00f6del believed, happened without a reason,\u201d says Stephen Burdiansky. \u201cIt was at once an affirmation of ultrarationalism, and a recipe for utter paranoia.\u201d<\/p>\n

You need hindsight to see the paranoia waiting to pounce. But the ultrarationalism — that was always tripping him up. There was something worryingly non-stick about him. He didn\u2019t so much resist the spirit of the time as blunder about totally oblivious of it. He barely noticed the Anschluss, barely escaped Vienna as the Nazis assumed control, and, once ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, barely credited that tragedy was even possible, or that, say, a friend might die in a concentration camp (it took three letters for his mother to convince him).<\/p>\n

Many believed that he\u2019d blundered, in a way typical to him, into marriage with his life-long partner, a foot-care specialist and divorc\u00e9e called Adele Nimbursky. Perhaps he did. But Burdiansky does a spirited job of defending this \u201cuneducated but determined\u201d woman against the sneers of snobs. If anyone kept G\u00f6del rooted to the facts of living, it was Adele. She once stuck a concrete flamingo, painted pink and black, in a flower bed right outside his study window. All evidence suggests he adored it.<\/p>\n

Idealistic and dysfunctional, G\u00f6del became, in mathematician Jordan Ellenberg\u2019s phrase, \u201cthe romantic\u2019s favourite mathematician\u201d, a reputation cemented by the fact that we knew hardly anything about him. Key personal correspondence was destroyed at his death, while his journals and notebooks — written in Gabelsberger script, a German shorthand that had fallen into disuse by the mid-1920s — resisted all-comers until Cheryl Dawson, wife of the man tasked with sorting through G\u00f6del\u2019s mountain of posthumous papers — learned how to transcribe it all.<\/p>\n

Biographer Stephen Budiansky is the first to try to give this pile of new information a human shape, and my guess is it hasn\u2019t been easy.<\/p>\n

Burdiansky handles the mathematics very well, capturing the air of scientific optimism that held sway over the intellectual Vienna and induced Germany\u2019s leading mathematician David Hilbert to declare that \u201cin mathematics there is *nothing* unknowable!\u201d<\/p>\n

Solving Hilbert\u2019s four \u201cProblems of Laying Foundations for Mathematics\u201d of 1928 was supposed to secure the foundations of mathematics for good, and G\u00f6del, a 22-year-old former physics student, solved one of them. Unfortunately for Hilbert and his disciples, however, G\u00f6del also proved the insolubility of the other three. So much for the idea that all mathematics could be derived from the propositions of logic: G\u00f6del demonstrated that logic itself was flawed.<\/p>\n

This discovery didn\u2019t worry G\u00f6del nearly so much as it did his contemporaries. For G\u00f6del, as Burdiansky explains, \u201cMathematical objects and a priori truth was as real to him as anything the senses could directly perceive.\u201d If our reason failed, well, that was no reason to throw away the world: we would always be able to recognise some truths through intuition that could never be established through computation. That, for G\u00f6del, was the whole point of being human.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing to be a Platonist in a world dead set against Platonism, or an idealist in the world that\u2019s gone all-in with materialism. It\u2019s quite another to see acts of sabotage in the errors of TV listings magazines, or political conspiracy in the suicide of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The Elysian calm and concentration afforded G\u00f6del after the second world war at the Institute of Advanced Study probably did him more harm than good. \u201cG\u00f6del is too alone,\u201d his friend Oskar Morgenstern fretted: \u201che should be given teaching duties; at least an hour a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, though, neither his friendships nor his marriage nor that ridiculous flamingo could tether to the Earth a man who had always preferred to write for his desk drawer, and Burdiansky, for all his tremendous efforts and exhaustive interrogations of Godel\u2019s times and places, acquaintances and offices, can only leave us, at the end, with an immeasurably enriched version of G\u00f6del the wise child. It\u2019s an undeniably distracting and reductive picture. But — and this is the trouble — it\u2019s not wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt G\u00f6del by Stephen Budiansky for the Spectator, 29 May 2021 The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt G\u00f6del did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[895,223,893,496,894],"class_list":["post-3285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-institute-for-advanced-study","tag-mathematics","tag-paranoia","tag-spectator","tag-vienna-circle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3285"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3289,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3285\/revisions\/3289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}