Hilbert and the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Along with Henri Poincar’e (1854–1912) of France, David Hilbert (1862–1943) of Germany was the spokesman for early twentieth century mathematics. Hilbert is said to have been one of the last mathematicians to be conversant with the entire subject—from differential equations to analysis to geometry to logic to algebra. He exerted considerable influence over all parts of mathematics, and he wrote seminal texts in many of them. Hilbert had an important and profound vision for the rigorization of mathematics (one that was later dashed by the work of Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and others), and he set the tone for the way that mathematics was to be practiced and recorded in our time.