One of two dozen researchers assigned to sort out protein functions was an immunologist named David Hilbert.

FORBES: Companies & Strategies

In 1900, David Hilbert, a German mathematician and contemporary of Einstein's, in a famous speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians, presented a list of what he considered to be the 23 most important problems for the new century.

ECONOMIST: Mathematics

Formal proof is a notion developed in the early part of the 20th century by logicians such as Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, along with mathematicians such as David Hilbert (who can fairly be described as the father of modern mathematics) and Nicolas Bourbaki, the pseudonym of a group of French mathematicians who sought to place all of mathematics on a rigorous footing.

ECONOMIST: Just what does it mean to prove something?