What is David Hilbert?
[[File:Hilbert.jpg|thumb|right|David Hilbert. Picture taken in 1912.]] '''David Hilbert''' ([[Königsberg]],<ref>Today in [[Kaliningrad Oblast]], [[Russia]].</ref> [[Prussia]], 23 January 1862 –[[Göttingen]], [[Germany]], 14 February 1943) was a [[Germany|German]] mathematician, logician, and philosopher of mathematics. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential and greatest mathematicians of the 19th and 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a range of fundamental ideas in many areas. He worked on [[invariant theory]], the [[axiom]]ization of [[geometry]], and the notion of [[Hilbert space]]. This is one of the foundations of [[functional analysis]]. Hilbert and his students supplied much of the mathematics needed for [[quantum mechanics]] and [[general relativity]]. He was one of the founders of [[proof theory]] and [[mathematical logic]]. He was also one of the first people to make the distinction between [[mathematics]] and [[metamathematics]], and warmly defended [[Georg Cantor]]'s set theory and [[transfinite numbers]]. == The Göttingen school == In 1895 Hilbert became Chairman of Mathematics at the [[University of Göttingen]], at that time the best research center for mathematics in the world. He remained for the rest of his life. Among his students were: [[Hermann Weyl]], the champion of chess [[Emanuel Lasker]], [[Ernst Zermelo]], and [[Carl Gustav Hempel]]. [[John von Neumann]] was his assistant. At the University of Göttingen, Hilbert was surrounded by a social circle of some of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, such as [[Emmy Noether]] and [[Alonzo Church]]. == Axioms and problems == === Hilbert's axioms === The text ''Grundlagen der Geometrie'' (''Foundations of Geometry'') was published by Hilbert in 1899. It proposed a formal set, Hilbert's axioms, instead of the traditional axioms of [[Euclid]]. They avoid weaknesses in those of Euclid, whose works at the time were still used textbmathematics is his 1900 presentation of a [[Hilbert's problems|set o