born April 28, 1906, Brünn, Austria-Hungary
died Jan. 14, 1978, Princeton, N.J., U.S.
Austrian-born U.S. mathematician and logician.
He began his career on the faculty of the University of Vienna, where he produced his groundbreaking proof (see Gödel's theorem ) in the early 1930s. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1940 and taught at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. There his close friendship with Albert Einstein led him into the field of general relativity theory and to solutions of some of Einstein's equations. A quiet and unassuming man, Gödel did not at first recognize the importance of his famous theorem, and later in life he declined many of the honours that it brought him.