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Top of the pile
78
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Stephen Budiansky
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
May 11, 2021
The first biography to fully draw upon Gödel's voluminous letters and writings to explore Gödel's profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. It also offers an intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna, a haunting account of Gödel's and Jewish intellectuals' flight from Austria and Germany at the start of the Second World War, and a vivid re-creation of the early days of the Institute for Advanced Study [in Princeton, NJ], where Gödel and Einstein both worked. A portrait of the odd, brilliant, and tormented man who has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle.
What The Reviewers Say
... potent and entertaining.
It might be thought that the justification for another biography of Gödel is that previous biographies were in some ways incomplete—or, to put it another way, that a new work should add substantially to what we already know. Does Stephen Budiansky’s Journey to the Edge of Reason pass this test?.
Budiansky exposes the social and political influences that shaped the life of this brilliant Austrian mathematician, illuminating particularly the dramatic events that caused him to flee a country losing its soul to Nazi barbarians to join Einstein in the exclusive Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. But Budiansky’s greater accomplishment is that of penetrating a mind that reoriented the entire mathematical world with the famous incompleteness theorems.
One of the great geniuses of the 20th century, barely known outside academia today, receives a much-needed expert biographical treatment.
