Two-Day Celebration Honors Work of Great Logician, Mathematician

He’s considered the most significant logician of the 20th century and one of the greatest modern mathematicians, yet most people have never heard of Kurt Gödel or his famous incompleteness theorems. Westmont will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the theorems and the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The two-day, interdisciplinary forum will be held Feb. 3 and 4. It will include Westmont’s mathematics, computer science, theater arts and philosophy departments.

The forum will begin Friday, Feb. 3, at 3:30 p.m. in Hieronymus Lounge and continue that evening with a theatrical production in Porter Theatre.

Westmont welcomes professors from around the globe to speak about Gödel’s work, Saturday, Feb. 4, at 9:30 a.m. in Hieronymus. Speakers will include Michael Detlefson, University of Notre Dame, Michael Stob, Calvin College, and Daniel Isaacson, Wolfson College, Oxford.

All events are free and open to the public.

Time magazine's centenary issue named Gödel one of the 20 most important scientists and thinkers of the last 100 years.

He was born in Austria-Hungary in 1906. He earned his doctorate in mathematical logic from the University of Vienna in 1930 and published the incompleteness theorems when he was 25.

Gödel showed the limitations of mathematics and proved other significant theories, the ramifications of which are still being felt today. In 1964, J. R. Lucas published "Minds, Machines and Gödel," which used Gödel’s theorems to argue that it is impossible to duplicate human thought by computer, essentially limiting artificial intelligence.

During the 1930s, Gödel visited the United States several times and became a good friend of Albert Einstein. He became a U.S. citizen in 1948 and later a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

As brilliant as he was, Gödel suffered from paranoid psychological disorder and died of starvation in 1978.

The play “Seventeenth Night” by Apostolos Doxiadis, which will be performed Friday night, creates a fictional account of Gödel’s last days. In it, he refuses to eat any food, believing that people were trying to poison him.

“Even with all his logic he couldn’t see that his assumptions were wrong,” says Westmont professor Russell Howell.

Schedule
Directions to campus.