On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Translated by B. Meltzer with Introduction by R. B. Braithwaite.

First edition in English, first impression, of the famed incompleteness theorems, overturning a century of efforts to place the whole of mathematics on an axiomatic basis and proving that the bounds cannot be those of one formal system. This edition includes a preface by R. B. Braithwaite (1900-1990), Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. For Gödel, even in elementary arithmetic there exist propositions that cannot be proven or disproven within the system. Mathematics is not finished, as had been believed, and computers can never be programmed to answer all mathematical questions. The theorems were originally published in Monatshefte für Mathematik in 1931. Newman, pp. 1668-95. Octavo. Formulae in the text. Original light green cloth, spine lettered in red. With dust jacket. With bookseller's ticket of Dillon's University Bookshop, London, to front pastedown. Boards gently splayed, rear cover faintly mottled; jacket unclipped, spine toned, extremities creased, closed tears to rear cover sometime repaired with tape on recto and verso: a very good copy in like jacket.…