From Trotsky to Gödel: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort
”He also helped to edit the papers of Kurt Gödel, known for his famous (and famously difficult) Incompleteness Theorems, <i>which establish that there can be no consistent axiomatic theory of logic from which the whole of mathematics can be derived</i>, a man who has been called the most important logician since Aristotle.”<p>Gödel’s work is characterized like this all the time, like if he proved that there is something magical about mathematics, as if it’s above and beyond logic. But that’s not what Gödel proved, right?<p>My understanding is: All of mathematics can in principle be derived from ZFC. Gödel proved that there are mathematical statements (conjectures) that are true but cannot be proven (in ZFC). They are however, by definition, not theorems (in ZFC) and not part of mathematics in any reasonable sense.