Kurt Godel. Portrait of the Austrian-US logician and mathematician Kurt Godel (1906-1978). Godel worked in Vienna, Austria, and then, from 1940, in Princeton, USA. His 1931 proof that no finite set of axioms is sufficient to form the basis for all statements about integers, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, is of major import to mathematicians and philosophers. It ended attempts to construct an axiomic logical system to encompass the whole of mathematics. He also proved that axioms cannot be shown to be contradictory using the system that is based on them. He suffered from nervous breakdowns and depression. When he became convinced that he was being poisoned, he starved himself to death.