Cassou-Noguès takes the reader through the logician’s most significant achievements, from his early completeness theorem for first-order logic (1929) to his later predictions on Jewish mathematician and mystic Georg Cantor’s “Generalized Continuum Hypothesis” (1947)—all by route, of course, of his most celebrated work: the “Incompleteness Theorem”, whose repercussions made Gödel’s name outside the realms of math, influencing such diverse and far-flung fields as psychoanalysis, philosophy, and linguistics, to name but a few. Cassou-Noguès relates Gödel’s work to that of Church and Turing, whose thesis states there are numbers and functions that cannot be computed by any logical machine.

In concise language the author lays out, for students and enthusiasts, the basics of Gödel’s thought, clearly showing why the enigmatic Czech remains one of the 20th century’s incontestably great minds.