Three of the books mentioned in the bibliography - those by Rebecca Goldstein, John Dawson, and John Casti and Werner DePauli - are biographies. The page facing the title page in Dawson's Logical Dilemmas has a picture of Godel in 1967 at Amherst College, where he received an honorary degree. In 1975, an honorary doctorate from Princeton accompanied this 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 immeasurabily from his genius."

In the nineteenth century, developments in mathematics included such "undermining events" (as Rebecca Goldstein terms them in Incompleteness) as the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. Restoring the foundations of mathematics was the focus of the challenge David Hilbert made to his colleagues early in the twentieth century.

Godel announced his response as a 25 year old (born April 28, 1905) - delivering a super weapon against those who would try to hide what they don't know. Not many years later, he would be assaulted on the streets of his native Vienna, but his wife, Adele, "counterattacked" with an umbrella (in the word chosen by Burton Feldman, in the just published 112 Mercer Street: Einstein, Russell, Godel, Pauli, and the End of Innocence in Science). Godel emigrated to America in 1940 - the long way, via Russia and San Francisco, due to the war - and lived the remainder of his life in Princeton, where he established a fabled friendship with Einstein (the subject of the Feldman book cited above). A friend to both men and a colleague at the Institute for Advanced Studies, the economist Oskar Morgenstern, wrote in 1965 to Austria's then-Foreign Minister (and Chancellor to-be) Bruno Kreisky as follows: "There is absolutely no doubt that Godel is the world's greatest living logician; indeed, eminent thinkers such as Herman Weyl and John Von Neumann have declared that he is definitely the greatest logician since Liebniz, or even since Aristotle. It would seem that in the entire history of the University of Vienna the name of no figure teaching there has overshadowed Godel's.... Einstein once told me that his own work no longer meant much to him, and that he simply came to the Institute to have the privilege of walking home with Godel."

Godel had a long-term interest in the work of the philosopher Edmund Husserl, whose fate at the hands of the Nazis perhaps informed Godel's paranoia, which led to his death by (in Dawson's words) "self-starvation" 1978.