John L. Casti, a member of the faculty of both the Santa Fe Institute and the Technical Unviersity of Vienna, has written numerous acclaimed popular scinece books, including Would-be Worlds, Five Golden Rules, and The Cambridge Quintet. Werner DePauli is University Assistant and Oberrat at the Institute of Statistics and Computer Science of the University of Vienna. He is the author of several books in German about Godel.
These authors, both respected academics, hope that "by the time the reader gets to the end of this book, he or she will know why" Kurt Gdel (1906-78) is one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely. The complexity of the work for which Gdel is best knownDthe "Gdel Theorem" (baldly, that deductions from first principles can never be complete)Dis such that it cannot be made comprehensible in a popular treatment such as this. This is not to say that there is not much of interest hereDthere is. There are nice discussions of important contemporary issues, such as computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and more, but none of it makes Gdel's work any more intelligible. What the reader will find here, howeverDand on this basis alone the book deserves a place in most librariesDis details of the strange life of a mathematical genius who died from self-starvation owing to paranoia that someone was trying to poison his food.DLeon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, DC Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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