Kurt Gödel Studying in Vienna What subjects did Godel study in Vienna? mathematics and philosophy. How many years did he study in Vienna? I don't know. What school did Godel attend when he studied in Vienna? University of Vienna. Did Godel study in Vienna after World War 1? I don't know.
Did Kurt excell as a student while studying in Vienna?
Did Kurt Godel excel as a student while studying in Vienna?
At the age of 18, Godel joined his brother in Vienna and entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Godel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Godel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."  Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Godel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzuge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?  This became the topic that Godel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (Godel's completeness theorem). He was awarded his doctorate in 1930. His thesis, along with some additional work, was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. CANNOTANSWER
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Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( , ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a  logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Frege.

Gödel published his first incompleteness theorem in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna. The first incompleteness theorem states that for any ω-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the natural numbers that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers. The second incompleteness theorem, which follows from the first, states that the system cannot prove its own consistency.

Gödel also showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, assuming that its axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs. He also made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.

Early life and education

Childhood
Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic) into the German-speaking family of Rudolf Gödel (1874–1929), the managing director and part owner of a major textile firm, and Marianne Gödel (née Handschuh, 1879–1966). Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother; their correspondence was frequent and wide-ranging. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority which included his parents. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were often active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer in his time and for some years a member of the  (Men's Choral Union of Brünn).

Gödel automatically became a citizen of Czechoslovakia at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. According to his classmate , like many residents of the predominantly German , "Gödel considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". In February 1929, he was granted release from his Czechoslovakian citizenship and then, in April, granted Austrian citizenship. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gödel automatically became a German citizen at age 32. In 1948, after World War II, at the age of 42, he became an American citizen.

In his family, the young Gödel was nicknamed  ("Mr. Why") because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven, Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever; he completely recovered, but for the rest of his life he remained convinced that his heart had suffered permanent damage. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health", which would continue for his entire life.

Gödel attended the , a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, and was enrolled in the  from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects, particularly in mathematics, languages and religion. Although Gödel had first excelled in languages, he later became more interested in history and mathematics. His interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf (born 1902) left for Vienna, where he attended medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Gödel studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, and the writings of Immanuel Kant.

Studies in Vienna
At the age of 18, Gödel joined his brother at the University of Vienna. By that time, he had already mastered university-level mathematics. Although initially intending to study theoretical physics, he also attended courses on mathematics and philosophy.<ref>At the University of Vienna, Kurt Gödel attended several mathematics and philosophy courses side by side with Hermann Broch, who was then in his early forties. See: {{cite book|url=https://www.google.com/books?id=BFgpBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|title=Kurt Gödel: Das Album - The Album|author=Sigmund, Karl|author-link=Karl Sigmund|author2=Dawson Jr., John W.|author-link2=John W. Dawson Jr.|author3=Mühlberger, Kurt|page=27|publisher=Springer-Verlag|year=2007|isbn=978-3-8348-0173-9}}</ref> During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism. He read Kant's , and participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Gödel then studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."

Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency in mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published  (Principles of Mathematical Logic), an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: "Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement that is true in all models of the system?"

This problem became the topic that Gödel chose for his doctoral work. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus. He was awarded his doctorate in 1930, and his thesis (accompanied by some additional work) was published by the Vienna Academy of Science.

Career

Incompleteness theorem

In 1930 Gödel attended the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences, held in Königsberg, 5–7 September. Here he delivered his incompleteness theorems.

Gödel published his incompleteness theorems in  (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of  and Related Systems"). In that article, he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:
 If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is omega-consistent, it cannot be syntactically complete.
 The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.
These theorems ended a half-century of attempts, beginning with the work of Gottlob Frege and culminating in  and Hilbert's formalism, to find a set of axioms sufficient for all mathematics.

In hindsight, the basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false.
Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement.
That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that is true of arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system.
To make this precise, however, Gödel needed to produce a method to encode (as natural numbers) statements, proofs, and the concept of provability; he did this using a process known as Gödel numbering.

In his two-page paper  (1932) Gödel refuted the finite-valuedness of intuitionistic logic. In the proof, he implicitly used what has later become known as Gödel–Dummett intermediate logic (or Gödel fuzzy logic).

Mid-1930s: further work and U.S. visits
Gödel earned his habilitation at Vienna in 1932, and in 1933 he became a  (unpaid lecturer) there. In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and over the following years the Nazis rose in influence in Austria, and among Vienna's mathematicians. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, whose seminar had aroused Gödel's interest in logic, was assassinated by one of his former students, Johann Nelböck.  This triggered "a severe nervous crisis" in Gödel. He developed paranoid symptoms, including a fear of being poisoned, and spent several months in a sanitarium for nervous diseases.

In 1933, Gödel first traveled to the U.S., where he met Albert Einstein, who became a good friend. He delivered an address to the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. During this year, Gödel also developed the ideas of computability and recursive functions to the point where he was able to present a lecture on general recursive functions and the concept of truth. This work was developed in number theory, using Gödel numbering.

In 1934, Gödel gave a series of lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, entitled On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems. Stephen Kleene, who had just completed his PhD at Princeton, took notes of these lectures that have been subsequently published.

Gödel visited the IAS again in the autumn of 1935. The travelling and the hard work had exhausted him and the next year he took a break to recover from a depressive episode. He returned to teaching in 1937. During this time, he worked on the proof of consistency of the axiom of choice and of the continuum hypothesis; he went on to show that these hypotheses cannot be disproved from the common system of axioms of set theory.

He married  (née Porkert, 1899–1981), whom he had known for over 10 years, on September 20, 1938. Gödel's parents had opposed their relationship because she was a divorced dancer, six years older than he was.

Subsequently, he left for another visit to the United States, spending the autumn of 1938 at the IAS and publishing Consistency of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum-hypothesis with the axioms of set theory, a classic of modern mathematics. In that work he introduced the constructible universe, a model of set theory in which the only sets that exist are those that can be constructed from simpler sets. Gödel showed that both the axiom of choice (AC) and the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) are true in the constructible universe, and therefore must be consistent with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms for set theory (ZF). This result has had considerable consequences for working mathematicians, as it means they can assume the axiom of choice when proving the Hahn–Banach theorem. Paul Cohen later constructed a model of ZF in which AC and GCH are false; together these proofs mean that AC and GCH are independent of the ZF axioms for set theory.

Gödel spent the spring of 1939 at the University of Notre Dame.

Princeton, Einstein, U.S. citizenship
After the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, Austria had become a part of Nazi Germany.
Germany abolished the title , so Gödel had to apply for a different position under the new order. His former association with Jewish members of the Vienna Circle, especially with Hahn, weighed against him. The University of Vienna turned his application down.

His predicament intensified when the German army found him fit for conscription. World War II started in September 1939.
Before the year was up, Gödel and his wife left Vienna for Princeton. To avoid the difficulty of an Atlantic crossing, the Gödels took the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific, sailed from Japan to San Francisco (which they reached on March 4, 1940), then crossed the US by train to Princeton. There Gödel accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which he had previously visited during 1933–34.

Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".

Gödel and his wife, Adele, spent the summer of 1942 in Blue Hill, Maine, at the Blue Hill Inn at the top of the bay. Gödel was not merely vacationing but had a very productive summer of work. Using  [volume 15] of Gödel's still-unpublished  [working notebooks], John W. Dawson Jr. conjectures that Gödel discovered a proof for the independence of the axiom of choice from finite type theory, a weakened form of set theory, while in Blue Hill in 1942. Gödel's close friend Hao Wang supports this conjecture, noting that Gödel's Blue Hill notebooks contain his most extensive treatment of the problem.

On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion.

Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.

During his time at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. In 1949, he demonstrated the existence of solutions involving closed timelike curves, to Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He is said to have given this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. His "rotating universes" would allow time travel to the past and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric (an exact solution of the Einstein field equation).

He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.

Awards and honours
Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974. Gödel was elected a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1961 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1968. He was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Gödel Prize, an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, is named after him.

Later life and death
Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed  when he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978 He was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Adele died in 1981.

Religious views
Gödel was a Christian. He believed that God was personal, and called his philosophy "rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological".

Gödel believed firmly in an afterlife, saying, "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."

In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza." Of religion(s) in general, he said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not". According to his wife Adele, "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning", while of Islam, he said, "I like Islam: it is a consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded."

Legacy
The Kurt Gödel Society, founded in 1987, was named in his honor. It is an international organization for the promotion of research in logic, philosophy, and the history of mathematics. The University of Vienna hosts the Kurt Gödel Research Center for Mathematical Logic. The Association for Symbolic Logic has invited an annual Kurt Gödel lecturer each year since 1990. Gödel's Philosophical Notebooks are edited at the Kurt Gödel Research Centre which is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany.

Five volumes of Gödel's collected works have been published. The first two include his publications; the third includes unpublished manuscripts from his , and the final two include correspondence.

in 2005 John Dawson published a biography of Gödel, Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel (A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, ). Gödel was also one of four mathematicians examined in David Malone's 2008 BBC documentary Dangerous Knowledge.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote the 1979 book  to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, M. C. Escher and Johann Sebastian Bach. It partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.

Lou Jacobi plays Gödel in the 1994 film I.Q.Bibliography

Important publications
In German:
 1930, "Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37: 349–60.
 1931, "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–98.
 1932, "Zum intuitionistischen Aussagenkalkül", Anzeiger Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien 69: 65–66.

In English:
 1940. The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory. Princeton University Press.
 1947. "What is Cantor's continuum problem?" The American Mathematical Monthly 54: 515–25. Revised version in Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., 1984 (1964). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. Cambridge Univ. Press: 470–85.
 1950, "Rotating Universes in General Relativity Theory." Proceedings of the international Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, Vol. 1, pp. 175–81.

In English translation:
 Kurt Gödel, 1992. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. B. Meltzer, with a comprehensive introduction by Richard Braithwaite. Dover reprint of the 1962 Basic Books edition.
 Kurt Gödel, 2000. On Formally Undecidable Propositions Of Principia Mathematica And Related Systems, tr. Martin Hirzel
 Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press.
 1930. "The completeness of the axioms of the functional calculus of logic," 582–91.
 1930. "Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency," 595–96. Abstract to (1931).
 1931. "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems," 596–616.
 1931a. "On completeness and consistency," 616–17.
 "My philosophical viewpoint", c. 1960, unpublished.
 "The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy", 1961, unpublished.
 Collected Works: Oxford University Press: New York.  Editor-in-chief: Solomon Feferman.
 Volume I: Publications 1929–1936  / Paperback: ,
 Volume II: Publications 1938–1974  / Paperback: ,
 Volume III: Unpublished Essays and Lectures  / Paperback: ,
 Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G ,
 Volume V: Correspondence, H–Z .
 Philosophische Notizbücher / Philosophical Notebooks: De Gruyter: Berlin/München/Boston. Editor: Eva-Maria Engelen.
 Volume 1: Philosophie I Maximen 0 / Philosophy I Maxims 0 .
 Volume 2: Zeiteinteilung (Maximen) I und II / Time Management (Maxims) I and II .
 Volume 3: Maximen III / Maxims III 

See also

 Gödel machine
 Gödel fuzzy logic
 Gödel–Löb logic
 Gödel Prize
 Infinite-valued logic
 List of Austrian scientists
 List of pioneers in computer science
 Mathematical Platonism
 Original proof of Gödel's completeness theorem
 Primitive recursive functional
 Strange loop
 Tarski's undefinability theorem
 World Logic Day

Notes

References
 .
 .
 
 

Further reading
 Stephen Budiansky, 2021. Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel. W.W. Norton & Company.
 .
 .
 .
 .
 Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton Univ. Press.
 
 Jaakko Hintikka, 2000. On Gödel. Wadsworth.
 Douglas Hofstadter, 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage.
 Stephen Kleene, 1967. Mathematical Logic. Dover paperback reprint c. 2001.
 Stephen Kleene, 1980. Introduction to Metamathematics. North Holland  (Ishi Press paperback. 2009. )
 J.R. Lucas, 1970. The Freedom of the Will. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
 Ernest Nagel and Newman, James R., 1958. Gödel's Proof. New York Univ. Press.
 Procházka, Jiří, 2006, 2006, 2008, 2008, 2010. Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Genealogie. ITEM, Brno. Volume I. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume II. Brno 2006, . In German, English. Volume III. Brno 2008, . In German, English. Volume IV. Brno, Princeton 2008, . In German, English Volume V, Brno, Princeton 2010, . In German, English.
 Procházka, Jiří, 2012. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Historie". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton. Volume I. . In German, English.
 Ed Regis, 1987. Who Got Einstein's Office? Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.
 Raymond Smullyan, 1992. Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. Oxford University Press.
 Olga Taussky-Todd, 1983. Remembrances of Kurt Gödel. Engineering & Science, Winter 1988.
 Gödel, Alois, 2006. Brünn 1679–1684. ITEM, Brno 2006, edited by Jiří Procházka, 
 Procházka, Jiří 2017. "Kurt Gödel: 1906–1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2017. Volume I. (). In German, English.
 Procházka, Jiří 2019. "Kurt Gödel 1906-1978: Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton 2019. Volume II. (). In German, English.
 Procházka, Jiří 2O2O. "Kurt Gödel: 19O6-1978. Curriculum vitae". ITEM, Brno, Wien, Princeton
2O2O. Volume III. ((( ISBN 978 8O-9O5 148-1-2))). In German, English. 223 Pages.
 Yourgrau, Palle, 1999. Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe. Chicago: Open Court.
 Yourgrau, Palle, 2004. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.'' Basic Books. Book review by John Stachel in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (54 (7), pp. 861–68):

External links

 
 
 Time Bandits: an article about the relationship between Gödel and Einstein by Jim Holt
 Notices of the AMS, April 2006, Volume 53, Number 4 Kurt Gödel Centenary Issue
 Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson discuss Kurt Godel
 "Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth" Edge: A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein on Kurt Gödel.
 It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Gödel's Mathematical Complexities.
 Gödel photo gallery.
 Kurt Gödel
 National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir

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Edwin Othello Excell (December 13, 1851 – June 10, 1921), commonly known as E. O. Excell, was a prominent American publisher, composer, song leader, and singer of music for church, Sunday school, and evangelistic meetings during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Some of the significant collaborators in his vocal and publishing work included Sam P. Jones, William E. Biederwolf, Gipsy Smith, Charles Reign Scoville, J. Wilbur Chapman, W. E. M. Hackleman, Charles H. Gabriel and D. B. Towner.

His 1909 stanza selection and arrangement of Amazing Grace became the most widely used and familiar setting of that hymn by the second half of the twentieth century. The influence of his sacred music on American popular culture through revival meetings, religious conventions, circuit chautauquas, and church hymnals was substantial enough by the 1920s to garner a satirical reference by Sinclair Lewis in the novel Elmer Gantry.

Excell compiled or contributed to about ninety secular and sacred song books and is estimated to have written, composed, or arranged more than two thousand of the songs he published. The music publishing business he started in 1881 and that eventually bore his name was the highest volume producer of hymnbooks in America at the time of his death.

Early years
Excell was the son of German Reformed minister and self-published author J. J. Excell. He was born in Uniontown, Stark County, Ohio and attended public schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania.  After marrying in 1871 near Brady's Bend, Pennsylvania, he relocated to that state and supported his family for several years as a plasterer, bricklayer, and singing instructor. His focus was turned to sacred music through his experience leading songs at revivals and worship services of Methodist Episcopal churches, first in East Brady and then, starting in 1881, Oil City, Pennsylvania.  Between 1877 and 1883 he studied music formally at the Normal Musical Institutes of George F. Root where he also received vocal training under Root's son, Frederick.  He moved to Chicago, base of Root's operations, in 1883 to pursue music publishing in earnest.

Vocalist and song leader

Excell was described as "a big, robust six-footer, with a six-in caliber voice" and extraordinary range that enabled him to solo as baritone or tenor.  Publisher George H. Doran observed him leading songs at a revival and later noted that Excell "was a master of mass control; he might easily have become conductor of some mighty chorus". These talents fostered his early success as a rural singing teacher in Pennsylvania and helped secure a position as church choirmaster for the two years preceding his move to Illinois.

Two important contacts made during his early years in Chicago were Benjamin F. Jacobs and John H. Vincent. Both men had been heavily involved with the uniform Sunday school lesson system established among many Protestant denominations during the early 1870s. Vincent was also co-founder of the original Chautauqua Assembly and involved with the burgeoning church youth movements of the era, such as Christian Endeavor and Epworth Leagues. Excell assisted with the music of their Sunday school work for at least two years and later served as music editor for correspondence courses Vincent established through the Chautauqua Press. He also performed as a vocalist for programs at the Chautauqua Institution.  Insights gained from these associations were significant in that much of what Excell would later publish targeted Sunday school and youth program music needs.

The Methodist Episcopal church of Excell's day was still divided into northern and southern denominations created by an antebellum split.  Excell and Vincent were affiliated with the northern branch known as the Methodist Episcopal Church.  In 1885 he met Sam P. Jones, a Georgia evangelist of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and was invited to join him as vocalist the following year, which included a campaign in Toronto during October 1886.

Jones' musical director at that time was Marcellus J. Maxwell of Oxford, Georgia.  He was also a capable singer and songwriter, though more reserved than Excell.  They became an effective musical team known informally as "Ex and Max". At some point prior to 1895, Excell became the principal song leader and vocalist Jones referred to as "this big-hearted, noble soul ..., my chorister, Brother Excell." The respect was mutual and good natured.  In 1887 Excell wrote and published a spiritualized rendition of "one of the trite sayings of the Reverend Sam P. Jones" titled You Better Quit Your Meanness.  It was dedicated to Jones by "his Co-Worker, E. O. Excell". They worked together throughout the United States and Canada until Jones' death in 1906.  Though their twenty-year partnership was not exclusive, it was one of the most significant influences on Excell's career.

While serving as Jones' chorister, Excell became adept at crafting large volunteer choirs out of recruits from multiple local churches that had never sung together before. These combined revival and evangelistic meeting choirs typically had fewer than 400 participants.  However, William Shaw of Christian Endeavor listed Excell among Ira Sankey, Homer Rodeheaver, and other distinguished musicians who had led choirs in the range of one thousand to four thousand voices at their conventions.

Excell assisted a number of other evangelists and religious conference leaders in various musical capacities.  He worked as a vocalist for William E. Biederwolf, a Presbyterian minister active with the Winona Lake Bible Conference and its related chautauqua, with whom he also collaborated on a number of hymnbooks. During the final decade of his life he assisted with the music program of British evangelist Gipsy Smith.

Music publisher, compiler and editor

Excell compiled a collection of hymns and gospel songs around 1880 which was published as Sacred Echoes by John J. Hood of Philadelphia in 1881, the year he marked as his start in the business.  Sing the Gospel, published around the time of the move to Chicago, was issued under the "E. O. Excell" imprint. Echoes of Eden followed two years later in 1884.  An archetype of later "combined" song books was produced in 1885 when contents of Sing the Gospel, Echoes of Eden and limited new material were repackaged into The Gospel in Song, a hymnbook later advertised to contain the songs and solos sung by Excell at Sam Jones' Gospel meetings.

Sam Jones Influence

The working relationship initiated with Jones in 1886 proved to be a pattern of the age. A contemporary writer explained that prominent evangelists always "had their leading singers, they were billed on the hoardings of the cities after the manner of theatrical companies – Moody and Sankey; Sam Jones and Excell; Chapman and Alexander; Torrey and Towner; and so on." The promotional benefit for a sacred music publisher was enormous.  Excell's books were used in Jones' revivals and the contents revised over time to suit changing preferences and the needs of the campaigns.

Three song books aimed at different applications were published in 1886 and 1887.  All three became series that ran through most of the years Excell was affiliated with Jones' ministry:
 Excell's Anthems (1886) for choirs was followed by volumes 2 through 6 and three combined editions of which Excell's Anthems, Vols. 5 & 6 Combined (1899) was the last.
 Excell's School Songs (1887) for school, class, and home use was followed by numbers 2 through 4 and two combined editions ending with Excell's School Songs, Nos. 3 & 4 Combined (1903).
 Triumphant Songs (1887) for Sunday schools and revivals was followed by numbers 2 through 5 and two combined editions (Nos. 1 & 2 and Nos. 3 & 4).  The last book in this series was Triumphant Songs No. 5 (1896).

Make His Praise Glorious, published in 1900 as the Triumphant Songs series was approaching its end, contained Excell's initial arrangement of Amazing Grace based upon the tune New Britain. He compiled and published at least another six song books with the E. O. Excell imprint during his final years with Jones. Excell and his song books received significant exposure in the majority of U.S. states and Canadian provinces of his day during the twenty years they worked together.

Collaborations
Only about seven new song books were published by Excell under his own imprint in the years following Jones' death, though the annual quantity of books sold still managed to more than double during that time.  The business changed to involve a greater number of collaborations destined for other publishers and private label printing of denominational hymnals. Some of the most substantial were:

 Methodist Episcopal – Early collaborations were established through Excell's Methodist connections.  Two hymnbooks were compiled for the Book Concerns of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1897 and 1899.  Unfortunately his relationships with the publishing authorities within this northern branch of American Methodism were irreconcilably damaged in 1900 by the aftermath of a book contract he allegedly negotiated directly with the General Secretary of the Epworth League. However, opportunities with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South were unaffected and at least four hymn books were produced between 1909 and 1918 with W. C. Everett, manager of the Methodist Publishing House in Dallas, Texas.
 Charles Reign Scoville – At least three hymnbooks were compiled with this evangelist of the Christian Church and director of the Winona Assembly and Summer School Association for his C. R. Scoville imprint between 1909 and about 1915.
 W. E. M. Hackleman – Five or more hymn collections were produced between 1910 and 1914 with this Christian Church musician and published by the Christian Board of Publication or Hackleman Music Company.  Hackleman also worked on another three collections credited to Excell that were published posthumously.
 William E. Biederwolf – Three hymn collections and a combined edition were developed with this Presbyterian evangelist between 1912 and 1917 for Glad Tidings Publishing Company.  Excell had also been listed earlier as a special contributor on Hymns of His Praise No. 2 that Biederwolf compiled in 1906 with assistance from Homer Rodeheaver. One other hymn book, "Songs of the Evangelist" crediting both Biederwolf and Excell as contributors, was published posthumously in 1925.
 Hope Publishing Company – Joy to the World was compiled in 1915 for this publishing firm of another Chicago Methodist, Henry S. Date.  While Excell continued to publish collections under his own imprint, he worked on another three Hope hymnbooks with Date's successors through 1919.
 Single song book collaborations – Excell worked on one-book projects with a diverse number of his contemporaries.  Some of the more notable included:
William Shaw – Treasurer of Christian Endeavor on Jubilant Praise (1900).
J. Wilbur Chapman – Evangelist known for his work with singer Charles Alexander and moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly on Winona Hymns (1906).
D. B. Towner – Vocalist and musician with D. L. Moody's organization on Famous Gospel Hymns (1907).
French E. Oliver – Presbyterian evangelist and protégé of Charles Alexander on Oliver's Songs of Deliverance (1910).
Theodore M. Hammond – Congregational founder of Hammond Publishing of Milwaukee and regent of University of Wisconsin on The Very Best Songs for Sunday School (1911).
Marion Lawrance – Congregational Sunday school superintendent (laity) and general secretary of the International Sunday School Association on Eternal Praise (1917).

The portfolios of copyrights for contemporary songs and plates for classic hymns that Excell accumulated as a publisher and composer also led to printing work on denominational hymnals.  He produced the 1909 edition of Spiritual Hymns of Brethren in Christ in which he held copyrights for about one third of the six hundred songs selected by the hymnal committee. Another example was the original edition of Great Songs of the Church which he produced for the Churches of Christ in 1921.

E. O. Excell Company

Excell developed approximately fifty song books and contributed to at least another thirty-eight over his forty-year publishing career. By 1914, his company had produced close to 10 million books and was selling them at a rate of nearly a half million per year.  Annual output had grown to more than a million books by 1921, though with margins at wholesale levels.

Excell's only child, William Alonzo, participated in both the musical event and publishing businesses.  At least one publication, Chorus Choir Selections (1918), bore the "E. O. Excell & Son" imprint.  "E. O. Excell Company" was utilized on publications created after the founder's death.  Excell's grandson, known as E. O. Excell, Jr, was also engaged in the family publishing business by 1927.

Lyricist, composer and arranger

Estimates of the number of songs authored, composed, or arranged by Excell range from two to three thousand. Two that remain well known are his 1909 arrangement of John Newton's Amazing Grace and the tune he composed for Johnson Oatman's Count Your Blessings.

Death and legacy

Excell fell ill while assisting Gipsy Smith with a revival in Louisville, Kentucky and returned to Chicago to be hospitalized.  He died on June 10, 1921, after more than thirty weeks in Wesley Memorial Hospital. Colleagues at the International Sunday School Association, where he had served for thirty-six years, said the following of him at their next convention:

At least five books listing him as a contributor were published posthumously. One of these was The Excell Hymnal published by his company in 1925; it was completed by his long-time collaborators Hamp Sewell and W. E. M. Hackleman as "a fitting climax to its long line of illustrious predecessors".

Heirs sold the large E. O. Excell Company copyright portfolio to the Hope Publishing Company in 1931 which they combined with their prior acquisition of a former Ira Sankey firm to create the Biglow-Main-Excell Company.  The most popular Excell compositions at the time of the sale were I'll Be a Sunbeam and Count Your Blessings.

Notes

References

External links
 

1851 births
1921 deaths
American Christian hymnwriters
American male composers
American composers
American Methodist hymnwriters
American gospel singers
American Methodists
Composers of Christian music
Gospel music composers
American music publishers (people)
Musicians from Chicago
People from Uniontown, Ohio
19th-century American writers
Singers from Ohio
19th-century American male singers
Songwriters from Ohio
Songwriters from Illinois Sidney Excell (23 December 1906 – December 1990) was a British Army major during World War II. He is remembered for the 1945 arrest of Nazi Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Bremervörde, Germany.

Early life
Educated at marine school in Chatham, Excell worked as an apprenticed shoe maker before joining the metropolitan police and then volunteering for the Palestine Police, in which he served in the 1930s. There he met his wife, Lisa, a Russian-Polish immigrant. They then left Palestine and went to England (British police were not allowed to fraternise with Jews or Arabs in Palestine). They were then married in Epping Essex.

Arrest of Himmler

On 22 May 1945, the British Army were manning a checkpoint at the Bremervorde Bridge in West Germany when three men were brought in for questioning and their documents examined.  One, claiming to be "Heinrich Hitzinger", raised suspicion, and Excell arrested all three. British soldier Arthur Britton soon identified "Hitzinger" as Heinrich Luitpold Himmler. The next day, while in custody in Lüneburg, Himmler committed suicide by poison, biting into a capsule of potassium cyanide before he could be interrogated.

Life after World War II
Excell continued to serve in the British Army. He was medically discharged from the army after contracting rheumatoid arthritis in his hands. He then went on to serve in the British Mandate Police in Palestine. Later, he worked for the London Electricity Board as an electrical engineer until he retired.

He died from heart failure in 1990 and is survived by two sons, four grandsons and three granddaughters, all of whom still carry his surname.

References

Heinrich Himmler
British Army personnel of World War II
British Army officers
1906 births
1990 deaths
People from Chatham, Kent
British colonial police officers