Journey to the Edge of Reason Quotes

“And he plainly disagreed with the reverence for Wittgenstein’s idea that mathematics, like language, was merely a tool, a set of rules or a syntax that had no inherent meaning in itself.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“In this he was diametrically opposed to the Platonist conception of mathematics as a body of ideal truths, preexisting somewhere “out there” independent of the human mind and awaiting human discovery.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“Brouwer’s radical view that mathematics is entirely a human construct was one Wittgenstein also fully shared. Brouwer dismissed the idea that mathematics in any sense constitutes an “objective” truth.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“they were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the new “scientific” anti-Semitic theories that ascribed a host of loathsome traits to Jews’ inherent racial characteristics.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“it was the Austrian universities that helped to make anti-Semitism respectable throughout the country.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“Hungary was drawn along in the same vortex of intellectual excitement and scientific progress that enveloped the rest of the empire. An extraordinary constellation of the twentieth century’s leading physicists and mathematicians were the product of its equally exceptional educational system at the turn of the century—John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Theodor von Kármán, Paul Erdös, and George Pólya, among many others. All came from Hungary’s Jewish middle class, all would flee Hitler’s Europe, and many would end up working during the Second World War for the Manhattan Project, helping to ensure that America, and not Germany, would be the first to build the atomic bomb. The educational reforms instituted in the era of ascendant liberal values in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire emphasized creative thinking and experimental curiosity over rote learning.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“Schönerer, he related in Mein Kampf how much he had learned during his years in Vienna from watching the mayor’s skill in flattering the urban proletariat, and in understanding that the less propaganda is based on intellectual appeals and reason, and the more on “the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel