Kurt Gödel (1906–1978)
Considered along with Aristotle, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell,[3]Alfred North Whitehead,[3] and David Hilbert were analyzing the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics pioneered by Georg Cantor.
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (GIT) is to be seen in the context of the birth of mathematical logic at the start of the 1900s (with Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica among others), when most of math could finally be shown to rely in systematic ways on the correctness of other math used to prove it, all the way down to a few axioms, which if you take as true, the rest must follow.
The GIT can be paraphrased as: "all consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions".
