The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness

A guidebook for reading Gödel

Kurt Gödel's 1931 article on incompleteness revealed some unexpected limitations in systems for proving theorems from axioms. Today we call these results Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems.

The Annotated Gödel is a book for people who want to read Gödel's article for themselves. It includes the complete article in a new English translation, broken into more than a hundred pieces and interleaved with commentary explaining each piece, step by step.

The translation uses modern mathematical notation and terminology. It replaces Gödel's German-based function names with English equivalents. Its language is less formal than that of the earlier translations, which date from the 1960s.

The book assumes some familiarity with mathematical definitions and proofs, at the level of an undergraduate abstract math course, as well as some knowledge of formal logic, from an introductory course or the equivalent.