he Gödel Centenary Research Prize Fellowship is the follow-up program to the Templeton Foundation’s commemoration in 2006 of the centenary of Kurt Gödel, who was considered by many in his field to have been the greatest logician since Aristotle. As part of those celebrations, the Foundation sponsored an international symposium of 20 leading scholars at the University of Vienna which was opened by the President of Austria, as well as a gala dinner addressed by world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
To create a more lasting tribute, the Foundation has initiated a $1.4 million grant for the establishment of a research fellowship prize program to encourage original research in logic that will further illuminate our understanding of the field. The awards comprise two pre-doctoral fellowships of $60,000 per annum for two years; two post-doctoral fellowships of $80,000 per annum, also for two years; and one senior fellowship of $120,000 for one year.
“We had around 60 applications in all categories,” reports Matthias Baaz, general secretary of the Kurt Gödel Society, which administered the awards. “One should, of course, explain that there is an estimated number of 250, maybe 300, logicians in the world.” He suspects the numbers might have been even higher, but that some younger applicants may have been deterred by the very rigorous format of the awards process.
Applicants were required to compete by publishing relevant research papers in a special issue of the journal Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. “This is one of the two most important journals in the field of logic,” says Baaz. Yet, even if some young logicians were intimidated by the process, others rose to the challenge: “The consequence of this competition was that, contrary to what was expected, the scientists in these young categories (pre- and post-doctoral) were very strong.”
An international Board of Jurors, chaired by Professor Harvey Friedman of Ohio State University, adjudicated the awards. “I definitely feel there were some outstanding awards given,” says Friedman, “and some outstanding finalists that didn’t make the winners’ list.” Fellowship proposals from all fields of logic were eligible, as well as proposals from philosophy, theology, and other fields of science, provided the research and the proposed project were based on the methods and achievements of contemporary logic so strongly shaped by Gödel’s way of mathematical reasoning.
This program will run until 2010. Baaz believes that the legacy of Gödel was crucial to his discipline. “Before Gödel, logic was in a certain sense very chaotic and in a mathematical sense not developed. After Gödel, it was completely different.” He forecasts that logic, which is perhaps undervalued today, will come into its own in the near future, as humanity strives to confront the consequences of ever-increasing automation, asserting the primacy of the human mind and reasoning.
These predictions relate primarily to the mathematical aspect of logic. On the philosophical side, does he think logic has a relationship to spirituality? “It has, for sure. Logic is something that orders the mind,” he says. “Without logic and human reason, you cannot speak of spirituality.”