Nonetheless Gödel apparently intended to remain in Vienna. His wife and he had signed a new lease on their apartment and had even arranged for some renovations. He had, in addition to renewing his apartment contract, made an attempt to become a Dozent neuer Ordnung. The authorities “of the New Order” who vetted his application noted that he was “well recommended scientifically” but that his Habilitation had been supervised by “the Jewish professor Hahn,” and that it “redound[ed] to his discredit” that he had “always traveled in liberal-Jewish circles.” To be fair to him, it was observed that “mathematics was at that time strongly verjudet,” or Jewified. The authority in charge of Gödel’s case, Dr. A. Marchet, the Dozentbundsführer, could find no statements by Gödel on record opposing National Socialism, but none supporting it either. Dr. Marchet’s decision, concerning the status of Kurt Gödel in the New Order, was not forthcoming; he could not bring himself either to approve Gödel or, for the time being, reject him.
The event that seemed to have precipitated his decision to leave Vienna was that Gödel was once again mistaken for a Jew, this time far more threateningly, since it was by a group of young thugs in the vicinity of the university. He was roughed up, his glasses smashed on the sidewalk. Gödel didn’t look unJewish, especially in his habitual long overcoat, his fedora, his heavy-framed thick eyeglasses. He looked like an intellectual, and that was incriminating enough. The doughty Adele, displaying the protective skills for which he no doubt married her, fought the fascists off with her umbrella.
Gödel had also received the shock of being declared fit for military service, which no one had been expecting. (The draft board in America almost automatically classified him 4-F—disqualified for physical reasons.) The authorities had refused to excuse him from military service on the basis of the heart that Gödel continued to maintain had been damaged by his bout of rheumatic fever at age eight. They also overlooked the more convincing evidence of his mental instability, including, by this time, a few more stays in sanatoria. This is a fortunate oversight, since “mental defectives” were dispatched not to the front but to places that more efficiently eliminated them.
It was difficult to obtain a leave of absence from the University of Vienna, as well as permission to leave Austria for America from both the Austrians and the Americans, but Gödel’s Princeton supporters—Abraham Flexner; Flexner’s successor as director of the Institute,7 Frank Aydelotte; Veblen; and von Neumann—all joined forces to make it possible for Gödel to cross the Atlantic. Gödel credited, in particular, Aydelotte’s letter to the chargé d’affaires at the German Embassy in Washington. In that letter, dated 1 December 1939, the new director of the Institute testified that Gödel was an Aryan who was one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. “His case could hardly create a precedent,” Aydelotte reasoned, “because there are so few men in the world of his scientific eminence.”
The Gödels began their journey to the New World, going first through Russia and onward to Japan on the trans-Siberian railway. The German certificate of exit had required this route, and in addition, as Gödel wrote in a letter to Aydelotte, “I am told in all steamship bureaux that the danger for German citizens to be arrested by the English is very great on the Atlantic.” They arrived in Yokohama on 2 February 1940, a day after the ship that had been booked for them by the Institute had sailed. They had to wait for the next ship, the President Cleveland, which docked in San Francisco on 4 March. From there it was a matter of taking the transcontinental railroad to New York, and then finally traveling to their new home in Princeton.
This sounds like rather a drama, in the normal sense of the word. But Gödel was coolly detached from the sort of drama that escaping Nazi Europe afforded. “Gödel has come from Vienna,” wrote Oskar Morgenstern in his journal. Morgenstern, too, was originally from Vienna and was naturally eager to get news of his beleaguered city from the newly arrived logician. “In his mix of profundity and otherworldliness he is very droll. . . .When questioned about Vienna, he replied ‘The coffee is wretched.’”
Adele would make the return trip several times after the war to visit her mother back home, but Gödel never set foot on European soil again. His mother would have to come to Princeton, as she did several times, if they were to see each other again. In fact, so unlike the typical peripatetic academic, he barely ever strayed, for the next 38 years of his life, out of the township of Princeton.
Gödel could not even be induced to make the easily walkable trip to Princeton University when, in 1975, it finally got around to offering him an honorary doctorate. He already had such degrees from Harvard, Yale, Amherst, and Rockefeller. It had been primarily through the efforts of Paul Benacerraf that the university decided to acknowledge the genius who had become, for those of us who cared, something like the Greta Garbo of the intellectual world, wanting to be alone. However, as commencement day approached, Gödel’s initial pleasure gave way to his far more characteristic tergiversation, continuing until the very morning of the event. Both Benacerraf and Simon Kochen offered to chauffeur him to the ceremony and attend to all other concerns, but Gödel ended up sitting the honor out. Perhaps he was miffed that the honor had come so late. “Ten years ago,” he told Morgenstern, “such a thing . . . would have been proper.” The one condition of receiving the honorary doctorate is that one show up. Therefore, although Gödel was listed in the program as having received a Doctor of Science, the program lied. Here, nevertheless, is the lovely citation: “His revolutionary analysis of received methods of proof in that most familiar and elementary branch of mathematics, the arithmetic of whole numbers, has shaken the foundations of our understanding both of the human mind and the scope of one of its favorite instruments—the axiomatic method. Like all important revolutions, his has not only shown the limits of old methods, but also has proved a fertile source of fresh ones, leaving new and flourishing disciplines in its wake. Logic, mathematics, and philosophy all continue to gain immeasurably from his genius.”
One anecdote of Gödel in America bears repeating, and this concerns his becoming an American citizen. This is perhaps the most famous story told about Gödel. (It comes to us by way of Morgenstern.) Not only does it involve Einstein playing straight man to that wild guy, Gödel, but it also sets off the cuddly eccentricity of the genius, and everybody seems to enjoy these kinds of tales. (At a reading I gave at my college of a chapter of this book, the “question period” quickly degenerated into a session of trading such stories about Gödel. Unfortunately, I’d already heard them all.)
Gödel had taken the whole matter of American citizenship very seriously, studying thoroughly in preparation for his exam; so thoroughly, in fact, that he made, he believed, a disturbing discovery: there is an internal contradiction in the American Constitution that would allow its democracy to deteriorate into tyranny.8
In a state of high consternation Gödel revealed his finding to Morgenstern. There was always a strongly legalistic bent to Gödel, a fascination with examining the meaning and implications of man-made laws that faintly mirrored his interest in the eternal laws of logic. The economist was both amused by Gödel’s argument and concerned, because he knew that, Gödel being Gödel, he might very well behave in such a way as to jeopardize his eagerly anticipated citizenship. Morgenstern consulted Einstein on how best to handle the logician.
On the day of Gödel’s citizenship test, 5 December 1947, Morgenstern and Einstein arrived to take Gödel to Trenton. Morgenstern was the designated driver and Einstein the designated distracter. As soon as Gödel stepped into the car, Einstein, not giving him a chance to speak, greeted him with a diverting joke.
“Well, are you ready for your next-to-last test?’”
“What do you mean, ‘next to last’?”
“Very simple. The last will be when you step into your grave.” Old-world hilarity.
Einstein continued on, telling story after story, including one about a recent autograph hound. He observed that such people are the last of
the cannibals, in that they seek to take possession of the souls of those they ingest. And so the three members of the Institute for Advanced Study managed to arrive at the Trenton federal courthouse. There were several applicants ahead of them and so Einstein was resigned to keeping up his diversionary shtick; but fortunately it turned out that the judge, whose name was Philip Forman, was the very one who had administered the oath of citizenship to Einstein some years before and he ushered the three men into his chambers immediately.
Einstein and Forman chatted for a while and Gödel, sitting quietly and biding his time, seemed all but forgotten. Eventually, though, Forman got on with the business of the day.
“Up to now you have held German citizenship.”
Immediately, Gödel corrected the judicial error: Austrian citizenship.
Duly corrected, the judge continued.
“In any case, it was under an evil dictatorship. Fortunately, that is not possible in America.”
This was just the opening the logician had been waiting for.
“On the contrary,” he objected, “I know precisely how it can happen here,” and he began to launch into his account of the flawed Constitution. Forman, Morgenstern, and Einstein exchanged meaningful glances and the judge called a halt to Gödel’s exposition, with a hasty, “You needn’t go into all that,” and steered the conversation round to less dangerous subjects. A few weeks after he’d taken the oath, Gödel aptly described Forman in a letter to his mother as “a very sympathetic person.”
“The Logic, It Was Impossible”
Every day, the two of them, Einstein and Gödel, would walk home together from the Institute, deep in conversation, and others watched them and wondered. Gödel took great pleasure—perhaps even pride—in the friendship; the references to Einstein in his letters to his mother bear witness to this. “I keep on wondering over Einstein’s walking to the Institute in such weather. But he appears to be in this respect a match of you in unreasonableness,” Gödel wrote his mother teasingly on an inclement 17 February 1948. And on July 12 of that same year: “I see Einstein almost daily. He is very robust for his age. One does not see that he is already nearly seventy and he now appears also to feel completely well in terms of his health.”
But it was only a few months after this, in the autumn of 1948, that Einstein, suffering attacks of pain in his upper abdomen, entered Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn for an exploratory laparotomy. An abdominal aneurysm was discovered. A few years later Einstein learned that the aneurysm was growing and, reported Helen Dukas, “We around him knew of the sword of Damocles hanging over us. He knew it, too, and waited for it, calmly and smilingly.”
Einstein was careful that Gödel, so obsessed with his own health, never knew. Einstein was always extremely protective of his delicate younger friend. So Gödel wrote repeatedly to his mother of Einstein’s robust health (compared to his own health problems, both real and imagined) until the letter of 25 April 1955. Einstein had died on 18 April 1955:
The death of Einstein was of course a great shock to me, since I had not expected it at all. Exactly in the last weeks Einstein gave the impression of being completely robust. When he walked with me for half an hour to the Institute while conversing at the same time, he showed no signs of fatigue, as had been the case on many earlier occasions. Certainly I have purely personally lost very much through his death, especially since in his last days he became even nicer to me than he had been all along, and I had the feeling that he wished to be more outgoing than before. He had admittedly kept pretty much to himself with respect to personal questions. Naturally my state of health turned worse again during last week, especially in regard to sleep and appetite. But I took a strong sleeping remedy a couple of times and am now somewhat more under control again.
After Einstein’s death, Gödel’s sense of exile must have deepened enormously. When Einstein had been ordered by his doctor to take a rest cure, there had been nobody, as Gödel complained to his mother, for him to speak to. Now there would permanently be nobody.
His profound isolation wasn’t only a matter of his intellectual estrangement from the philosophical positivism that he felt had trailed him to the New World from Vienna (which in some sense it had). On a personal level, as well, Gödel was quite completely alienated from his mathematical colleagues at the Institute. Unlike Einstein, they weren’t amused by his “strange axiom,” his version of Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, which disposed him to believe that everything that happens has a thoroughly logical explanation—especially since Gödel’s application of his axiom led him to believe that those in authority are indeed in authority for a sufficiently good reason. Gödel’s axiom inclined him to give the Powers That Be the benefit of the doubt—they must have their good reasons for their decisions and actions, even if all empirical evidence seems to indicate that they don’t—and such reasoning served to deeply divide the logician from his colleagues at the Institute.
So far as mathematics went, the mathematicians found that Gödel, logician though he was, was a ready participant in their theoretical discussions. “In fact, he knew more mathematics than I had suspected,” Borel explained to me when I visited him at the Institute. “He could participate in discussion not just about logic. In mathematics, he was really a participant to our discussions.”
It was in the more practical sphere that Gödel alienated his fellow mathematicians, at least as the practical presents itself at the Institute: the all-important issue of appointments. It’s particularly the matter of the permanent membership that snaps the most otherworldly of Institute thinkers to full attention: Who is worthy to enter the empyrean reaches of pure reason?
Flexner had chosen mathematics, “the severest of disciplines,” as his model; not only are mathematical results certain, but the relative depth and importance of the results are also certain. So, too, is the relative depth and importance of the mathematicians themselves commensurately certain. Mathematicians know exactly who among them is the best, and the best is what the Institute is all about. The Institute’s mathematicians have a tradition of judging other disciplines, well, severely.
The mathematicians balked at Flexner’s attempt to diversify the population at the Institute, to include scholars of economics, politics, and the humanities. Flexner managed to set up two new schools, one of economics and politics, another of humanistic studies, but the battle had been quite acrimonious and when Flexner retired four years later he was a very tired man. Getting the start-up money out of the Bamberger/Fulds—who, after all, had respect for him and his opinions—had been a piece of cake compared to getting his proposals past the mathematicians. His successor, Frank Aydelotte met, for the most part, with the mathematicians’ approval. He was, in Einstein’s words, “a quiet man who will not disturb people who are trying to think.”
When Aydelotte retired in 1947 the directorship passed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had returned to teaching at Berkeley and Caltech after the successful completion of the “Manhattan project”—the war-time mission that had brought together many of America’s leading physicists to develop the first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer had hesitated, as Einstein had, in making the move to Princeton. After visiting the Institute, he spoke mockingly of its “solipsistic luminaries.” Still he came, and it wasn’t long before he and the mathematicians were sniping at one another.
Oppenheimer, quite understandably, was interested in strengthening the Institute’s school of physics. Individual appointments brought mathematicians like von Neumann and Deane Montgomery into sharp opposition with the director. In Oppenheimer’s day the entire faculty voted on every appointment. Nobody could really judge the mathematicians’ work except the mathematicians themselves, though they seemed to have no trouble passing judgment on the work of the physicists, economists, historians, and humanists (yet another perk of residence in the highest turret of Reine Vernunft). Ironically, the otherworldly mathematicians were the force with which to be reckoned when it came to the most central practi
cal concern at the Institute. Some have theorized, somewhat facetiously, that the trouble with the mathematicians is not just the lofty standards that they’re used to employing, but that they also tend to work fewer hours of the day than other people. This leaves them ample time for mischief.
But it wasn’t simply Oppenheimer’s advocacy of nonmathematicians that poured fuel on the mathematicians’ ire. It was, in fact, the candidacy of the mathematician John Milnor that lit the match. John Milnor was then a mathematician at Princeton University. When he had been an 18-year-old freshman at Princeton he’d heard about a conjecture of the Polish topologist, Karol Borsuk, concerning the total curvature of a knotted curve in space. Milnor figured out a proof of the conjecture and took it to his professor, saying, “I can’t seem to find anything wrong with this, can you?” The professor couldn’t and neither could his colleagues. A year later, Milnor had worked out a general theory of the curvature of knotted curves that had the proof of Borsuk’s conjecture as a mere by-product. He’d gone on to a brilliant career, and the Institute mathematicians wanted him as one of their own. Oppenheimer opposed them, saying that there had been a pledge given to the university that the Institute would not come courting in its own backyard. The mathematicians countered that there had never been such a pledge, that Oppenheimer was constructing it ad hoc for his own ulterior motives. (The mathematicians’ doubts about Oppenheimer’s good faith were so deep and abiding that I could catch the echoes of them even today. One mathematician, describing the path that used to lead directly from Fuld Hall to Olden Farm, the director’s residence—the very path that Einstein and Gödel would daily walk—told me that after Einstein’s death Oppenheimer “for some reason suppressed the path,” that is, let the grass grow over it. “I have no idea why,” the mathematician concluded, giving me a dark look strongly suggestive of the sinister intent behind this path suppression.)
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