Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This authoritative biography of Kurt Goedel relates the life of this most important logician of our time to the development of the field. Goedel's seminal achievements that changed the perception and foundations of mathematics are explained in the context of his life from the turn of the century Austria to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

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Publishers Weekly Review

Mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), familiar to readers of Douglas Hofstadter's bestseller Gödel, 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 Gödel'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, Gödel 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. Gödel 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

By 1937 Kurt G"odel (1906-78) had completed his epic contributions to the logical foundations of mathematics. Dawson's few pages devoted to the reception of G"odel's incompleteness theorems contains an illuminating vignette into the intellectual climate that received G"odel's breakthrough, helping to sharpen the assessment of his achievement. By contrast, the story of G"odel's life from that point, alas, concerns, in the main, a man stymied by the high standards of his own youthful accomplishments and beset as well with severe but intermittent mental illness. That G"odel fastidiously saved all his personal papers allows Dawson to document his subject's decline in detail: his bouts of paranoia, his perhaps overly meticulous attention to the English translation of his early papers, his many unpublished manuscripts, his conversations with intellectual luminaries, his unsuccessful attempts to settle the Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis, his philosophical speculations, his odd opinions of world events. One reads all this mostly with prurient curiousity, but one very interesting insight does emerge: G"odel, whose incompleteness theorems often seem emblematic of the 20th-century intellectual zeitgeist characterized by loss of certainty, himself actively rejected the prevailing zeitgeist and embraced the sort of Platonism his own work might call into question; he even devoted himself to the formalization of logical proofs of the existence of God. Dawson pitches his book to readers with some mathematical background, but many undergraduates will find it within their range. Philosophy absorbed G"odel's productive energies during his later years, but he declined to publish anything, perhaps out of recognition of the unfashionable nature of his ideas and the fear for his reputation, perhaps because he never brought this work to a form he considered satisfactory. Wang met G"odel in 1949 and evidently became one of his most important confidants. Dawson describes Wang's From Mathematics to Philosophy (1974), on which the present volume expands, as "an opportunity of G"odel to disseminate his thoughts indirectly--an idea that no doubt appealed to his innate cautiousness." A less sympathetic interpretation might view Wang's new book as an attempt to extend the great man's canon posthumously, much as one might try to spin a tenth symphony out of some of Beethoven's sketches. We get G"odel's philosophical opinions, generally without the argumentation required to judge them; they may interest us as the philosophical thoughts of a great mind, but they do not establish G"odel as a great philosopher. Wang himself died before he could bring this book to final form, in particular before he could cut redundant material. Both books are for graduate students and faculty. D. V. Feldman; University of New Hampshire