The source
The exact words
Original German
“Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen.”
In English
“We must not believe those who today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone, prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: We must know. We will know.”
“Naturerkennen und Logik” (Logic and the Knowledge of Nature). Address to the Society of German Scientists and Physicians, Königsberg, 8 September 1930. The closing minutes were broadcast on radio and the recording survives.
The story
Why Hilbert said it
In 1872 the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond ended a famous lecture with “ignoramus et ignorabimus”: we do not know, and we will not know. Some questions about nature, he argued, lie forever beyond science. For half a century that Latin phrase stood for intellectual modesty, and Hilbert hated it.
In September 1930 Hilbert, newly retired and made an honorary citizen of his hometown Königsberg, gave the opening address to the Society of German Scientists and Physicians. He ended it by attacking the ignorabimus directly, and a radio station broadcast the last part. You can still hear him say “Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen.” and then laugh.
The irony is famous. The day before, at a small meeting on the foundations of mathematics in the same city, a 24-year-old Kurt Gödel had quietly announced the result that would become his first incompleteness theorem. Hilbert's program, the dream of proving that mathematics is complete and consistent, had already been answered, and the answer was no.
Hilbert never accepted defeat in spirit. The six words are carved on his gravestone in Göttingen. And the man behind Gödel's theorem had his own way of answering the slogan: read his line about the human mind and the machine.
Mathematician
Who was David Hilbert?
- Born
- 23 January 1862, Königsberg
- Died
- 14 February 1943, Göttingen
- Known for
- 23 problems (1900), Hilbert space
- Said it
- Königsberg radio address, 1930
David Hilbert was born in Königsberg in Prussia and spent most of his career at the University of Göttingen, which he and Felix Klein turned into the world capital of mathematics. His Foundations of Geometry (1899) rebuilt Euclid on a rigorous axiomatic base.
At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900 he presented a list of 23 unsolved problems that shaped the next century of research. He also worked on invariant theory, integral equations and the mathematics of general relativity, and Hilbert space is named after him.
