ABSTRACT
Kurt Godel was born in 1906 in Brno, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bertrand Russell, for some reason, believed that Godel was Jewish. In actuality his mother's family was Protestant, while his father was nominally an Old Catholic, although they were not church-goers. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered after World War I, the Godel family found itself part of the large German-speaking minority in the newly formed Czechoslovakia. German-speaking Vienna, a mere 68 miles to the south of Brno, with its fine university, soon drew Rudolf and Kurt to it. The Austrian Republic, formed from the debris of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, lasted a mere 20 years before it was absorbed into Nazi Germany in 1938. Whitehead and Russell had developed an artificial language for mathematics in which proofs of theorems could be represented by purely symbolic formal operations.
