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Thanks to Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem—the one that says, roughly, that mathematics can never prove its own consistency—mathematicians can’t be fully confident that the axioms underlying their enterprise do not harbor an as-yet-undiscovered logical contradiction. This possibility is “extremely unsettling for any rational mind,” declared the Russian-born mathematician (and Fields medalist) Vladimir Voevodsky, in a speech on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the Institute for Advanced Study - www.nybooks.com