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| Gödel’s work inspired Alan Turing and paved the way for the digital age. Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection |
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‘Ahead of his time’: AI Helps Unlock Discoveries Hidden in Notebooks of Man who Transformed Math
The Guardian
November 15, 2026
The Austrian logician Kurt Gödel was one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. His two incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, transformed mathematics and paved the way for the digital age.
After his seminal results of the 1930s, Gödel published only a few papers. His unpublished work, however, runs to tens of thousands of pages, and is of great interest to historians of science.
Since 2017, the Finnish logician Jan von Plato has led a project at Helsinki University to understand the contents of 16 notebooks that Gödel wrote in the early 1940s. This material – the “workbooks” – is 1,009 pages of densely written text about maths and logic. Much of it is written in a German shorthand, Gabelsberger, that was obsolete even when Gödel was using it.
Progress in the mathematical understanding of the text was painfully slow – about a page a week – until September, when von Plato enlisted the help of the AI model Claude. Within a couple of days, Claude had provided a comprehensive digest of the entire material, revealing Gödel had proved hundreds of theorems that no one knew about.
The most famous logician of modern times had, in fact, discovered significantly more than anyone had thought.
“I was flabbergasted,” said von Plato. “The workbooks not only contain dozens of anticipations of results not known until the 70s and 80s, but they also contain 14 themes in logic that have not been pursued. Gödel was far ahead of his time.”
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Did you solve it? Gödel’s incompleteness theorem
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Gödel changed the course of logic because he revealed the limits of mathematical knowledge. His incompleteness theorems show that in all mathematical systems there are true statements that can neither be proved or disproved. Yet while this result was a blow to previous generations of logicians, who had hoped that all truths were verifiable, Gödel’s work pushed the field in new directions, inspiring Alan Turing to write his 1936 paper that began the theory of modern computation.
In 1940, Gödel fled Austria under the Nazis. He settled in Princeton, New Jersey, and became a close friend of Albert Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study. Increasingly paranoid in his later years, he refused to eat food that was not cooked by his wife, and died of starvation in 1978.
Von Plato said he had started his Gödel project in 2017 because he was facing mandatory retirement from Helsinki University. “What should I do to make myself indispensable? Oh yes, I’ll start reading Gödel’s enigmatic shorthand pages!” He received a €2.5m (£2.1m) grant from the European Research Council, taught himself Gabelsberger shorthand – “I am one of only six people who can read it in the world” – and assembled a small team.
In August, at a conference in France about AI and theorem proving, von Plato met computer scientists who suggested that he co-opt the help of Claude in trying to make sense of the workbooks. On his return to Helsinki he began the process, showing Claude his transcriptions of the workbooks, as well as six books he had previously written on Gödel and other secondary scientific literature.
“In a couple of days, I got to see a 650-page explanation of the workbooks. It had to be controlled page for page, but it’s basically a work that is impossible to do for human beings,” he said. “Humans read one page at a time and we tend to forget things. It takes us a year to read about 50 pages. We just are not able to keep in mind all the different parts.
“The AI can connect all the pieces in a thousand pages. It can see all of Gödel’s writings as one piece.”
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