Kurt Schütte

Kurt Wilhelm Schütte was born on October 14, 1909, in Salzwedel, Germany. He studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, and philosophy at the University of Göttingen, where David Hilbert was his doctoral advisor, making him Hilbert's last student. After obtaining his doctorate in 1934 with his thesis "Untersuchungen zum Entscheidungsproblem der mathematischen Logik," Schütte worked as a meteorologist for the Reich Weather Service from 1937 until the end of World War II. He married Hanna Lechte in 1937, and they had two daughters. Schütte's significant contributions lie in the fields of proof theory and ordinal analysis. He is particularly known for the Feferman–Schütte ordinal, which precisely bounds predicativity. Despite later becoming blind, he continued his mathematical work using a tape recorder. Kurt Schütte passed away on August 18, 1998, in Munich.