Gödel’s great stroke of genius—as readers of Nagel and Newman will see—was to realize that numbers are a universal medium for the embedding of patterns of any sort, and that for that reason, statements seemingly about numbers alone can in fact encode statements about other universes of discourse. In other words, Gödel saw beyond the surface level of number theory, realizing that numbers could represent any kind of structure.
come to think of it, that does make sense
