David Hilbert

David Hilbert (1862-1943), leading German mathematician and mathematical philosopher of his generation. Born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Hilbert studied and then taught at the university there until 1895, when he transferred to the University of Göttingen and made it into a world-renowned mathematical center. He worked in several fields of mathematics, including number theory and the calculus of variations, but his major contributions were made in the field of geometry. In his 1899 The Foundations of Geometry (English trans., 1902), he effectively replaced Euclid's geometry with a much more thorough and abstract set of 21 axioms dealing with points, lines, and planes and the six types of relations between them.

At the turn of the century, Hilbert proposed 23 mathematical problems for investigation. Most have since been solved. He also tried to establish the underlying consistency of all mathematics, an effort that was eventually proved impossible by the American logician Kurt Gödel in 1931.