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Person

David Hilbert

A man with light-colored hair and a beard wearing glasses and formal attire, including a suit jacket and tie, stands against a neutral background.

German mathematician (1862–1943) who set the agenda for early twentieth-century mathematics with his list of 23 unsolved problems in 1900. His foundational programme sought a complete, consistent, finitely-checkable axiom system for all of mathematics. Gödel's 1931 paper showed the programme as originally stated was impossible. Hilbert never publicly accepted the verdict.

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