Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906–1978) was surely one of the most penetrating and productive formal logicians of this century, if not of all time. He stands among a shining constellation of logical greats: Aristotle, Ockham, Leibniz, Boole, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Hilbert, Turing, Post, Church, and Novikov. He did not have the enigmatic character of Peirce and Turing nor the rebellion of Russell nor was he a folk hero like his close friend Einstein. But he reshaped all of modern logic by developing tools particularly useful to computer science. Still, Gödel had no students and never bothered to develop a particular school of logic that could be called Gödelian.

Here is the second major effort on the life and works of Gödel; for the other see [1]. Written by a well-known logician in close contact with Gödel in his last years, it concentrates on Gödel’s life and his thoughts in logic, physics, philosophy, and religion, as well as their connections to technology. It relies heavily, but not exclusively, on Gödel’s published corpus. The author promises us a second book, to be titled Conversations with Kurt Gödel, which will deal with Gödel’s more private sayings, oral and written. There are several photographs in this book, which supplement the photographs in [1].

The book by Hao Wang addresses the whole spectrum of Gödel’s existence; a chronology of the major events in his life; his creative work on the completeness of first-order logic, the incompleteness of arithmetic, the limits of formalization, the consistency of the continuum hypothesis, relativity theory (on rotating universes), and religion (a proof of the existence of God); and his family life. It goes much deeper than [1] in explicating Gödel’s life and thoughts, but it does not include copies of Gödel’s technical papers as [1] does. For example, we find that Gödel (1) was “fit for garrison duty” in the German army; (2) like Alan Turing, had a special fondness for the movie Snow White; and (3) shortly before his death, stated, “I have lost the faculty for making positive decisions. I can only make negative decisions.” The author frequently discusses gossip by various leading scientists, logicians, and philosophers about the quality of the works of other scientists, logicians, and philosophers.

The book is well written, and I highly recommend it. It belongs in every school library.