Death of Kurt Gödel

Date: January 14, 1978 • Location: Rome, Italy

Austrian logician Kurt Gödel, who suffered from an obsessive fear of being poisoned, died of starvation after his wife was hospitalized and unable to cook for him.

Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. Informal logic examines arguments expressed in natural language whereas formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a specific logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.