. . . Either you believed in mathematics or you did not. - TopicsExpress

. . . Either you believed in mathematics or you did not. Bertrand Russell (who, of course, did) had moved on to more gentle sorts of philosophy. Much later, as an old man, he admitted that Gödel had troubled him: It made me glad that I was no longer working at mathematical logic. If a given set of axioms leads to a contradiction, it is clear that at least one of the axioms must be false. On the other hand, Viennas most famous philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (who, fundamentally, did not), dismissed the incompleteness theorem as trickery (Kunstsücken) and boasted that rather than try to refute it, he would simply pass it by: Mathematics cannot be incomplete; any more than a sense can be incomplete. Whatever I can understand, I must completely understand. Gödels retort took care of them both. Russell evidently misinterprets my result; however, he does so in a very interesting manner, he wrote. In contradistinction Wittgenstein . . . advances a completely trivial and uninteresting misinterpretation. — James Gleick, Information Society