Einstein's Genius Club (14 page)

Yet it is hard to bring the young (or later) Gödel into focus. He never showed much of himself to anyone. Contemporaries described him as quite interested in what others said but saying little himself, speaking precisely but very briefly when he did, and rarely on topics outside mathematics.
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Alert but withdrawn—he never changed; his watchful photographs suggest this. Even his publishing record can be described as withdrawn: He wrote much but published very little, because he disliked exposing himself to controversy or criticism. Cautious about every word destined for public scrutiny, he could delay promised material for years. His greatest work, the first incompleteness theorem, was announced at a mathematics conference with such modesty that it almost escaped unheard.

Still, glimpses of the unexpected emerge. Gödel's marriage was such a case. He met his future wife, Adele, in 1927, when he was twenty-one. She was a nightclub dancer, married at the time to a Viennese photographer, and eight years his senior. Marrying Adele was a gamble. If Gödel were to have a chance at an academic life, he would be expected to uphold high social standards. The title “Professor” carried with it civil service status, and thus much scrutiny. (As the hapless Herr Professor Rath discovers in the 1928 film
Blue Angel,
marrying a dancer invites merciless scorn and degradation.) Gödel's mother and brother were opposed to the marriage. The Gödel family was well-to-do, solidly middle class, well educated; Adele would not fit in. She was distinctly lower-class. She was uneducated and Catholic, with a port-wine stain on her face, and later developed a habit of bullying Gödel.
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The otherwise devoted son and sober academic Gödel defied family and propriety when, after several years of secret engagement, he married Adele. Both families were represented at the private ceremony, but Gödel's brother had never met Adele before, and none of Gödel's friends were notified of the wedding date.
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Man and mouse at once: He seems to have wanted a wife who would protect and mother him, yet he acted boldly and cunningly enough in making sure he married her.

Adele was hardly a typical Princeton wife. Gödel's closest friend apart from Einstein, the Princeton economist Oscar Morgenstern, minced no words: She was a “Viennese washerwoman type: garrulous, uncultured, strong-willed” whose “astonishing bad taste” in décor he deplored. His wife Dorothy was “roused to indignation” by Adele's treatment of the frail and retiring Gödel, noting, among other trespasses, that Adele smoked.
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Still, Adele was a good choice for Gödel. She had the outgoing toughness and directness that he lacked. (After Germany annexed Austria, Nazi gangs roamed the streets attacking those who seemed to belong to the wrong side. In 1939, walking with Adele near the
university, Gödel was assaulted and his glasses knocked off. Adele counterattacked with her umbrella and saved him.) His great discoveries in logic came before the marriage, but Adele very likely kept his later career going, especially as he became more hypochondriac and fearful. She was adaptable as few wives might be. In Princeton, Gödel believed that gases from the furnace might poison him, so the heat was turned off—even during winter.
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Their home life otherwise revolved around the quiet middle-class pleasures of “house and garden, food and digestion, household helpers, weekly accounts, summer vacations… families and relatives, anniversaries, birthdays,” and the like.
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Gödel arranged his life to avoid disturbing his concentration.

The marriage was probably happier on Gödel's side than Adele's. She spoke English badly, had little interest in intellectual pursuits, and found Princeton stifling. When Gödel refused to move to a livelier city, she escaped by traveling frequently to Europe. Gödel was a recluse at best. He was uncomfortable in social situations. If she could be a shrew—at times, Gödel said, hysterical—they suited each other. Despite all their differences, Gödel and Adele remained married until his death.

Gödel came of age in turbulent Vienna, center of a world in chaos. After its defeat in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled. Economic pressures mounted. Fascists, socialists, and Nazis fought in the streets. In early 1933, civil war broke out. Chancellor Dollfuss abolished the parliament, set up a dictatorship, and suppressed socialists and Nazis alike by force. In July 1934, Dollfuss himself was assassinated by the Nazis. Weak governments followed. Hitler invaded in 1938 and turned Austria into a province of Greater Germany.

Gödel, meanwhile, graduated from the University of Vienna in 1930 and began the difficult task of finding work among the rigid and closed hierarchies of Austrian and German universities. His incompleteness theorems of 1931—though as epochal as relativity
—seemed to many mathematicians to be off in the remote margins where logic and mathematics met. So, highly esteemed by a few but otherwise undistinguished and unconnected, Gödel searched for a position as a Dozent, the lowest rung on the academic ladder. Professors had tenure and received their salaries regardless of whether many or none took their courses; a Dozent had no tenure and no salary, and collected fees only according to how many students enrolled. In summer 1933, Gödel taught his first course at the University of Vienna. It would be twenty years, perhaps, before he could expect to be named professor.

However, his prospects improved drastically even before he began his summer course. The young mathematician John von Neumann had been present when Gödel presented his incompleteness theorems. Unlike many others, von Neumann immediately grasped the significance, and he began spreading the word in Princeton, where he had taught since 1930. Oswald Veblen, the senior mathematician at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), invited Gödel to visit the Institute, starting in the fall of 1933. His year went well and included a trip to Cambridge to lecture at the Mathematical Association of America. He returned to Europe in May and was in Vienna by early June. The summer brought more political chaos and a subtle escalation of Nazi influence. Although scheduled to return to the IAS in the fall of 1934, Gödel had a nervous breakdown, which he hid from Veblen (claiming an infected tooth) and spent several weeks in a sanatorium. One year later, he returned to Princeton. The voyage must have been stimulating, for he sailed with Wolfgang Pauli and the mathematician Paul Bernays, also en route to the IAS. But within two months, Gödel suffered a recurrence of depression and returned to Vienna, with Veblen's assurance that he could return at any time. Gödel's lifelong mental instability seemed to have taken shape. He spent much of the remaining year reading up on toxicology and psychiatry. His marriage in 1937 calmed him, and he was able to return to Princeton in the fall of 1938.

Meanwhile, his constant leaves of absence from the University of Vienna and his inattention to bureaucratic requirements came back to haunt Gödel. He had neglected to request a leave in 1938 until well after he was ensconced in Princeton. Having caught the attention of the Ministry of Education, he returned in 1939 to a Vienna dramatically changed under the Nazi takeover. His Dozent appointment was on the verge of expiring.
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Only a “New Order Dozent” position—bestowed at the pleasure of the Nazi regime—was available. Gödel filled out an application. A Nazi bureaucrat with the inimitable title of
Dozentenbundführer
(Leader of the Association of Dozents)
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reported that Gödel's doctorate had been directed by a Jewish professor (Hans Hahn) and that Gödel “always traveled in Jewish-liberal circles.”
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However, there was no record of Gödel's having disparaged Nazism. The application lingered in officialdom. Meanwhile, Gödel was examined for military duty and, astonishingly, found fit to serve. Facing the unthinkable, Gödel acted quickly, negotiating quietly for a visa to the United States. Despite bureaucratic tangles, Flexner at the IAS was able to wangle a special visa for him. Only after the incident with the Nazi thugs, however, did Gödel decide to leave Austria. To obtain transit visas, he and Adele were forced to take a circuitous route through the USSR (then a Nazi ally) to Japan, where they set sail for California. Within days of landing, the Gödels arrived safely in Princeton.

In retrospect, Gödel's behavior in 1938 and 1939 is puzzling and disturbing. He was in Vienna on March 12, 1938, when Germany invaded Austria. The next day, Hitler spoke to a hundred thousand people in the Heldenplatz and decreed Anschluss, annexing Austria to Germany. Almost immediately, Austrian anti-Semitism burst out violently. Persecution of the Jews was savage. Crowds watched gleefully as Jewish doctors, businessmen, and well-dressed women were forced to scrub the sidewalks of Vienna with toothbrushes until they were clean of anti-Nazi slogans. The third largest Jewish community in the world—and the most sophisticated
—was suddenly stripped of dignity, position, and employment. Stores, homes, and synagogues were broken into and looted; many thousands of Jews were imprisoned or shipped to concentration camps.

Even though he had been in the United States during some of the worst atrocities, the reclusive Gödel could not have been unaware of what was happening. Jewish (and liberal non-Jewish) academics were among the first targets. Colleagues, friends, and neighbors disappeared overnight to exile, prison, or death. He was surrounded in America by refugees and well-informed opponents of Nazism.

The answer lies not in his political inclinations, but in his psyche. He was neither anti-Semitic nor pro-Nazi. Rather, he was excessively detached. When he had lunch with the newly arrived Austrian-Jewish mathematician Gustav Bergmann, driven into exile in 1938, Gödel stunned Bergmann by asking, “And what brings you to America, Herr Bergmann?”
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The mathematician Karl Menger, an old friend from Vienna, recalled that he never uttered a word to Gödel about the horrors unfolding in Europe simply because Gödel seemed unconcerned—except for the threat to his Dozent position.
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One can only wonder how Gödel's friendship with Einstein survived such a striking difference in temperament and outlook. Nothing was further from Gödel's self-absorption than Einstein's engagement with the world. Einstein never hesitated to break a rule or disregard legalities to do right. Gödel's obsession with legalities struck everyone who knew him. To be legalistic is to cleave to the letter of the law—the rules—rather than to the spirit, and thus to a narrowed view of what is at stake. Adhering to the letter was hardly appropriate in a world ruled by Nazis.

Gödel's obsessive legalism, the consequence of an extreme rationalism, was famous. Whereas a reasonable person accepts the muddle of life's confusion, imperfection, and accidents, the extreme rationalist seeks to banish dilemmas by so precisely defining
problems that the solution seems simple. (The paranoid is perhaps the only perfect rationalist: Every seemingly random act, gesture, look, or word is part of a logical pattern; no stray threads, accidents, coincidences, luck, or flukes can exist.
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Gödel, in the grip of such a view, finally starved himself to death, convinced he was saving himself from untrustworthy doctors.
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) Sometimes, Gödel's attempts to rationalize the world were comic. In 1947, he had to travel to Trenton for an interview regarding his application for citizenship. Einstein and the economist Oscar Morgenstern went along. On the way, Gödel remarked that he had studied the Constitution very closely, expecting to be drilled on its contents, and had discovered a fatal flaw in its logic. Alarmed, Einstein and Morgenstern cast about for ways to distract Gödel, lest he bungle his interview by lecturing on the Constitution's shortcomings. Einstein told joke after joke about whatever came to mind. When at last Gödel's turn came, the justice asked an innocuous question: “Do you think a dictatorship like that in Germany could ever arise in the United States?” Gödel saw his opening. “I know how that could happen,” he said, and began to explain that fatal flaw. The judge, who knew Einstein, quickly changed the subject—and approved Gödel's citizenship.

When Gödel returned to Princeton in 1940, he was given only temporary appointments, to be renewed each year—this despite his renown. Only in 1946 was he given a permanent appointment—still as a visitor, not as one of the permanent faculty. In 1953, at age forty-seven, he was finally made a professor—and even that came after he had been awarded honorary degrees by Yale and Harvard and shared the first Einstein Medal in 1951.

Why had it taken so long for a professorship? For his part, von Neumann thought it absurd: “How can any of us be called professor when Gödel is not?”
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Doubtless the delay was due to considerable apprehension on the part of several faculty members worried about Gödel's mental health. Others were irritated by his legalistic and interminable arguments during committee meetings and his
habit of phoning at all hours of the night to talk about trivial matters. Eventually, of course, he was promoted. Gödel himself seemed indifferent and was never heard to complain about his treatment.

Gödel can scarcely be summed up by his private aberrations. Mathematics is the most highly rationalized form of thought, and Gödel was one of the great mathematicians. What is most intriguing is that he discovered contradiction and finitude in the heart of mathematics. The incompleteness theorems for which he is famous prove that no mathematical system can be both consistent and complete. His proofs are elegant and irrefutable.

Within this hyperrationalist mathematician lived a seemingly obverse personality.
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He believed in ghosts, for instance. Our instinct is to ascribe such a belief to psychological problems. Except for frightened children, who takes ghosts seriously? Yet Gödel's university mentor, Hans Hahn, and the philosopher Rudolf Carnap frequented mediums. How do we reconcile their beliefs with a rational world view? Gödel never explained how he came to think that ghosts exist. Did he himself see them? Or read about them in fairytales? Or dream them? Yet are ghosts so different, for instance, from the Platonic idea of numbers? Such numbers are as puzzling as ghosts—they exist only as mental entities, but they are nonetheless real, not invented but discovered, in the same sense that astronomers discover stars and zoologists discover different species of life. Hence, reason is not mere finger play in the void; the objects of reason are inscribed in the eternal order of things.