David Hilbert

German mathematician, one of the most influential of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working chiefly at Gottingen. At the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris he presented a list of twenty three unsolved problems that shaped mathematical research across the following century; Fermat's Last Theorem and the Riemann Hypothesis both appear on it. He championed formalism, the view that mathematics is fundamentally the manipulation of formal symbol systems by explicit rules, and proposed Hilbert's program to place all of mathematics on a finite, provably consistent axiomatic foundation, a project Godel's 1931 incompleteness theorems showed could not succeed in its original, most literal form.