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David Hilbert
German mathematician who defended and axiomatized Cantorian set theory and posed the Entscheidungsproblem.
David Hilbert (1862–1943) championed Georg Cantor’s set theory against its early critics — “No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created,” he wrote — and built his own foundational program, an axiomatic formalization of mathematics, partly in its defense. Working at Göttingen, where a young John von Neumann studied under him in the 1920s, Hilbert posed the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) in 1928 with Wilhelm Ackermann, asking whether an algorithm could decide the truth of any mathematical statement — a question Alan Turing answered negatively in 1936 by defining the Turing machine.