Gödel’s incompleteness theorem: The man who ruined mathematics
Logician, mathematician, philosopher and destroyer Kurt Gödel Pictorial Press/Alamy Kurt Gödel, the man who ruined mathematics, was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He was born in 1906, smack-bang in the middle of the greatest crisis that maths has ever known. Just a few decades later, he would help resolve this turmoil, but in doing so doom mathematicians to a smaller world than the one that came before. Mathematics, as an intellectual framework, is incredibly powerful. The entire point is taking one set of logical ideas and using them to build another, making maths the closest thing we have to a cognitive perpetual-motion machine – there is always a new mathematical idea lurking across the horizon, and we just need to assemble the steps to get there. Or so it might seem. But in reality, there is a dark fundamental truth at the heart of mathematics that places limits on our intellectual exploration. It is called Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The story of this theorem begins in the late 19th century, when …
