Kurt Gödel

Math is a game about truth discovery. As well as any game, it has some rules. This rules are called axioms, and they are the base to decide when something is true or false. Within the 23 problems that Hilbert published in 1900, he ask to find a list of rules that are inductive (like the rules of natural numbers) and consistent (with no contradictions), and so that any phrase can be decided to be true or false.

Kurt Gödel, Austro-Hungarian mathematician, born in April of 1906, proved that what Hilbert asked for was impossible. In particular, he said that in every inductive system that is consistent, it is impossible to decide if the claim “this system is consistent” is true or false.

Gödel was convinced that people wanted to kill him, so he wouldn’t eat anything besides what his wife would cook. When she got sick and stayed in the hospital, he died of hunger, with only 29.5 kilograms of weight.