In 1931, the mysterious-sounding article "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I" shook the mathematical world. In this article, Kurt Gödel proved two incompleteness theorems that have fundamentally changed our view of mathematics. Gödel's theorems manifest that the concept of truth and the concept of provability cannot coincide.

Since their discovery, the incompleteness theorems have attracted much attention, and a flood of articles and books have been devoted to their striking consequences. For good reasons, however, hardly any work deals with Gödel's article in its original form: His complex lines of thought described with meticulous precision, the many definitions and theorems, and the now largely outdated notation turn Gödel's historical masterpiece into a difficult read.