Book Reviewed: The Goddess of small victories, by Yannic Grannec

Book Reviewed: The Goddess of small victories, by Yannic Grannec

Frau Gödel

"The Goddess of small victories" is probably not the title I would have used to write about the life and times of Adele Nimbursky (nee Porkert) married to one of the greatest mathematicians of 20th century, Kurt Gödel. This book is primarily a work of fiction but interwoven with many personal facts about the love, romance and the marriage of Adele and Kurt Gödel. One of the main pretexts of this work is that Adele refused to hand over the personal and professional documents of Kurt Gödel to Princeton University; hence the university assigned this task to someone who could retrieve these from Frau Gödel when she was living at a retirement home in Pennsylvania. Some of the facts may have been distorted here; Adele Gödel had given some manuscripts to Princeton, and recently Oxford University published five volumes of Gödel's collected works that included Gödel's Nachlass, a collection of manuscripts, notes, and correspondence.

Albeit partly fictional, the book brilliantly captures the lives of Adele and Kurt from 1927 when they were living on the same street in Vienna. She was a cabaret dancer and he was a young man strongly interested in mathematics, physics and philosophy. Their relationship had difficult beginning. Gödel's mother did not approve of Adele since she was divorced, a cabaret dancer and seven years older than Kurt. The political environment was unfriendly since the influence of the Third Reich in Austria was growing rapidly. Although Adele got to spend time with Kurt and many of his intellectual friends in Vienna, his mental illness had sent him to the sanitarium; at times he was severely ill and she cared for him with tender loving care, and loved him deeply as any dedicated woman would. Their early years were very happy despite some obstacles. After leaving Vienna, and arriving at Princeton, their horizon expanded, especially to Kurt Gödel. Kurt's strong friendship with other Princeton luminaries like Albert Einstein and John von Neumann produced fruitful exchange of thoughts of some of the greatest minds in physics and mathematics. Kurt Gödel and Einstein were neighbors living in Princeton and they were known to take long walks together to the Institute for Advanced Study where they both worked. Later in life, Kurt Gödel became a reclusive and for the fear of food poisoning, never ate food and eventually died of anorexia. There was one woman who stood by him, through thick and thin; that was Madam Adele. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the life of Kurt Gödel.