In 1947, one of the greatest logicians in history nearly derailed his own US citizenship hearing by trying to explain to the judge a loophole he had found in the Constitution that could legally permit a dictatorship. This episode traces the life of Kurt Gödel, from a wealthy childhood in Brno where his family nicknamed him Mr. Why, through a bout of rheumatic fever that left him convinced for life that his heart was damaged, to the Vienna Circle seminars of Moritz Schlick that pivoted him toward mathematical logic. It also introduces Adele Nimbursky, the former dancer six years his senior who became his lifelong anchor.

The conversation explains Hilbert's program and how the 25-year-old Gödel shattered it in 1931 with the incompleteness theorems, using Gödel numbering to make mathematics talk about itself and laying the conceptual groundwor ...