- Lived:
- 1848–1925 · Wismar and Jena, Germany
- Tradition:
- German mathematician-philosopher; inventor of modern logic and founding father of analytic philosophy
- The Big Idea:
- Logic, rebuilt from the ground up, can reveal the hidden structure of thought and language — and arithmetic itself may be nothing but logic in disguise.
- In their words:
- "Always separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective."
- If you remember one thing:
- A man almost nobody read, lecturing to nearly empty rooms, quietly built the machinery that now runs every logic course, every programming language, and every database on Earth — and answered the destruction of his life's work with the most honest sentence in the history of thought.