Questions related to the work of Kurt Gödel. Please mind the spelling of his last name: "Gödel". If you cannot or don't know how to create the "ö", you might also write his name as "Goedel". In all cases, please avoid "Godel". If you want to create a (hyper)link to, say, a Wikipedia entry, you might have to manually change the "ö" to "%F6".
Kurt Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered with Aristotle and Frege one of the most significant logicians in human history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and David Hilbert were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.
Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.
He also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted axioms of set theory, assuming these axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
