Rate My Professor Kurt Gödel

Kurt Gödel was born on April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Brno, Czech Republic). He studied at the University of Vienna, earning his doctorate in 1930 with a thesis proving the completeness of first-order logic under the supervision of Hans Hahn. Gödel became a member of the faculty at the University of Vienna in 1930. He first visited the Institute for Advanced Study in the academic year 1933–34 and emigrated to the United States in 1940, settling in Princeton.

Gödel remained affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study for the rest of his life, becoming a permanent member in 1946, Professor in the School of Mathematics from 1953 until 1976, and Professor Emeritus thereafter. His major contributions include the incompleteness theorems published in 1931 and the proof of the consistency of the axiom of choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, published in 1940. He received the Albert Einstein Award in 1951 and the National Medal of Science in 1974. Gödel was elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, and received honorary doctorates from institutions including Harvard and Yale. He died on January 14, 1978, in Princeton.