Embarrassing Celebrity Deaths: Kurt Gödel
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Other celebrity deaths are more easily classified as straight-ahead embarrassing. But given Kurt Gödel’s extraordinary intelligence, his death is certainly embarrassing, but also shocking and sad.
Kurt Gödel, born in Austria-Hungary in 1906, was considered one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his time, thanks to his famous incompleteness theorems.
Not only a mathematician, Gödel was also a philosopher and a logician, and studied theoretical physics at the University of Vienna. At the young age of 23, he finished his doctoral dissertation. Gödel went on to earn the prestigious Albert Einstein Award in 1951 and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1974.
Unfortunately, the celebrated mathematician was plagued with health issues from a young age. When he was six, he was hit with rheumatic fever and became convinced that he had never fully recovered from it.
Furthermore, he suffered from depression, anxiety, and paranoia. Gödel even had several nervous breakdowns throughout his life as a result of his mental health conditions.
Nevertheless, in the 1930s, once his mathematics work had made him an international celebrity, Gödel started lecturing around the world. He met Albert Einstein in 1933 and the two became lifelong friends. But throughout his touring and lecturing, his mental health continued to deteriorate.
Then, in 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria, shortly after Gödel had gone through a bad depressive episode. He didn’t want to join the German army and he couldn’t get a position at the University of Vienna, so he married his girlfriend, Adele Nimbursky, and they moved to the U.S.
Theory and Logic GroupKurt Gödel (left) and Albert Einstein
Though Einstein was able to secure Gödel a teaching position at Princeton, nothing could be done about his increasing paranoia.
Kurt Godel’s deteriorating condition hit its low point when he became suspicious that someone was trying to poison him and refused to eat any meals that his wife hadn’t tasted first. So after she became ill in 1977 and had to be hospitalized for six months, Gödel wouldn’t eat anything at all. Starving himself to death, Gödel died on Jan. 14, 1978 of malnutrition. He weighed a meager 65 pounds.
