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".

Early mathematician, though in a totally different way – Ancient Greece didn't have our concept of math itself as a field of study. Prominent cult figure.

Gregor Mendel

• Versuche uber Pflanzenhybriden
• Complex arguments from experiments
• Organism traits are inherited as fixed and separate units

Sold his property for money to study and finally get into ecclesiarchy.

Noticed that if you cross white flowers with pink flowers the result would be pink, not in between. A minority got to be white.

Good teacher. Inspired (inspired by?) Darwin. Wasn't knowledgeable about statistics, but wanted to find a pattern in inheritancy.

Wasn't really listened to – Mendelism became a thing from 1900 on. Some botanists made similar experiments, then found the articles by Mendel, who had been more thorough.

His book's not quite as fun as Darwin's, but still a good walkthrough of logical thinking.

Second summary

• The individual organism in the centre of life is now dissolved - Goethe would have hated this!
• The road towards biochemical reductionism has started
• But one important step in this story remains, clearly belonging to physics… Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961)