 The Göttingen lectures that shortly followed the Zürich address (and that were recorded in an official protocol by Bernays) are a remarkable document, and mark the birth of modern mathematical logic. They are substantially the same as the published monograph known as “Hilbert and Ackermann” (1928), and even today, with modest supplementation, could serve as an introductory textbook for logic. Hilbert for the first time clearly distinguishes metalanguage from object language, and step-by-step presents a sequence of formal logical calculi of gradually increasing strength. Each calculus is carefully studied in its turn; its strengths and its weaknesses are identified and balanced, and the analysis of the weaknesses is used to prepare the transition to the next calculus. He begins with the propositional calculus, then moves to monadic quantificational logic (with an extended discussion of the calculus of classes, and of the Aristotelian syllogism), and then to the “function calculus”. 