born Jan. 23, 1862, Königsberg, Prussia
died Feb. 14, 1943, Göttingen, Ger.
German mathematician whose work aimed at establishing the formalistic foundations of mathematics.
He finished his Ph.D. at the University of Königsberg (1884) and moved to the University of Göttingen in 1895. In 1900 at the International Mathematical Congress in Paris, he laid out 23 research problems as a challenge to the 20th century. Many have since been solved, in each case to great fanfare. Hilbert's name is prominently attached to an infinite-dimensional space called a Hilbert space (see inner product space ), a concept useful in mathematical analysis and quantum mechanics .