‘Ahead of his time’: AI helps unlock discoveries hidden in notebooks of man who transformed maths

Kurt Gödel left 1,009 pages of densely written text – much of it in an obsolete shorthand – which is now said to contain hundreds of proved theorems

The Austrian logician Kurt Gödel was one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. His two incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, transformed mathematics and paved the way for the digital age.

After his seminal results of the 1930s, Gödel published only a few papers. His unpublished work, however, runs to tens of thousands of pages, and is of great interest to historians of science.