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Dartmouth’s Dan Rockmore suggests that it might conceivably involve the contradictions of gerrymandering, which is constitutional but democracy-defeating, or the minority-empowering Electoral College. That, presumably, was a bridge too far even for a logician. What was it? Probably not a loophole by which a Vice-President can simply refuse to recognize a slate of electors, during the Electoral College vote tally, and substitute one of his own choosing, thereby keeping his boss in power. Indeed, the question of Gödel’s loophole has inspired a remarkably large speculative literature, in serious scholarly journals as well as among scholars in this magazine, and recently among academics writing online. But he was far too exact a reader, and far too exacting a logician, not to have spotted something. He never defined it, and no trace of his discovery seems to linger in his papers. Gödel’s loophole, as some have called it, remains a mystery. Isn’t it good that such a thing can’t happen here, the judge replied.
But, at the ceremony, the judge asked Gödel where he came from, and he explained that he was from Austria, which had once been a democracy but was now a dictatorship. He shared this discovery with Einstein, and also with Oskar Morgenstern, the co-founder of game theory and a mutual friend both men begged him not to make an issue of it during the test.
He studied the local laws ferociously-trying to learn why, in New Jersey, a township is distinguished from a borough-and buried himself in the Constitution, which he studied as though it were the “Principia Mathematica.” And he emerged confident that he had found a logical contradiction in the Constitution that could reverse democratic government itself.
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citizenship test, in the nineteen-forties, imagined, in best Viennese form, that it would be a real test, not the pro forma examination it was. The story goes that Gödel, while preparing for a U.S. as much to be Einstein as he was to do physics.) (The same was true of Albert Einstein, who was at the I.A.S. An institute benefits from the presence of the most famous logician of his age, even as a genial presence. This “delusion” was, in fact, perfectly true and acutely seen-he hadn’t achieved anything equivalent, but then no one could.
One piece of evidence, for instance, of what was termed his “paranoia” was that he insisted to his psychiatrists that the Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton, where he had taken a position in 1940, after the Nazi Anschluss, would have to fire him, since he had done nothing there of value equal to the work he’d done when he was twenty-five. Gödel was a remarkable character, who sadly descended into mental illness as he aged, though his ailment always took in the context of his fiercely logical mind. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock Kurt Gödel never defined the constitutional loophole he’d found, but he was far too exacting a logician not to have spotted something.