Clippings

Genius though he was, Gödel was not a poster boy for mathematical sanity. Obsessed with ghosts and demons and an imagined heart ailment, he checked himself in and out of sanitariums many times in his adult life for treatment of depression and acute anxiety. He was always a finicky eater, but as he got older he ate less and less, refusing to take food from anyone but his wife Adele, fearing that other people were secretly trying to poison him. At sixty-four he weighed only eighty-six pounds. In the middle of 1977, when Adele was hospitalized for major surgery, he stopped eating altogether, and by the following January starved himself to death at the age of seventy-one. In his dying days he had serious doubts that his life’s work amounted to anything more than the discovery of another silly paradox à la Barber of Seville. He was plagued by Russell’s nightmare of future librarians trashing his work.