Ernest Nagel, James Newman Godel's Proof

Annotation

Godel's Proof was first published in the US in 1958. In 1931 there appeared in a German scientific periodical a relatively short paper with the forbidding title "On Formally Undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems". Its author was Kurt Godel, then a young mathematician of 25 at the University of Vienna who since 1938 was a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The paper is a milestone in the history of logic and mathematics. When Harvard University awarded Godel an honorary degree, the citation described the work as one of the most important advances in logic in modern times. At the time of its appearance, however, neither the title of Godel's paper nor its content was intelligible to most mathematicians.