David Hilbert

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, a…