Ever Your Kurt: The Intimate Family Letters of Kurt Gödel

Ever Your Kurt: The Intimate Family Letters of Kurt Gödel

The mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) wrote some 280 letters to his mother Marianne and brother Rudolf from 1940, the year he arrived in America to take up what would become a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until 1975, three years before his death. These letters constitute not only a unique source of biographical details of Gödel’s life during this time, but are the most direct and intimate record of the innermost thoughts, personality and character, philosophical and political views, interests, and obsessions, of the brilliant thinker whose Incompleteness Theorems shook the mathematical world when he announced his groundbreaking result in 1930, at age 24. The first complete English translation of these letters, Ever Your Kurt —a companion volume to editor Stephen Budiansky's highly acclaimed new biography of Gödel, Journey to the Edge of Reason (Norton and Oxford, 2021)—will be of interest to all who share a fascination with one of the most original and enigmatic minds of the twentieth century.