David Hilbert is read about 1,095 times a day, in 135 languages.
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Something wrong?He handed the 20th century its mathematical to-do list. In 1900, Hilbert posed a set of problems that steered entire fields for decades - some solved, some still open, all seeded from a single mind that redrew the borders of rigor itself.
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, The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.
One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.
Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.
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Born in Prussia on 23 January 1862, Hilbert cut through invariant theory, algebraic number theory, and the foundations of geometry before he was forty. He defended Cantor's set theory when it was still suspect and co-founded proof theory, turning the question "what can we prove?" into a discipline. In 1900 he stood before the International Congress and delivered his collection of problems - a blueprint that occupied mathematicians for generations. His students and methods shaped modern mathematical physics, planting rigor where intuition had reigned. He died in Göttingen on 14 February 1943, after the world he'd helped build had already moved past him.
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