Well, although it's neither directly biographical (practically nil is known of G's last days, except that he didn't eat thinking the hospital staff wanted to poison him) neither mathematical in the way that PETROS is, the play is very much about the Incompleteness Theorem. Christos Papadimitriou actually gives it in his paper as a good example of the 'illustration mode' of Math Fi, i.e. the mode whereby the work illustrates the math, rather than presenting it. I think he is right, in the sense that this is no biopic, my intention was to write something on the philosophical significance of the IT. Both Christos and Greg Chaitin, who work on the field from the side of computer science seem to think I've done the job, but you'll form your own opinion when you see it. Thus, yes, although the play does not contain direct mathematical dialogue in the final version (a previous one also featured David Hilbert as lecturer/storyteller but he's been cut out, poor sod) it is VERY mathematical, in fact more so in essence than PETROS

I want to take a bow to works like Denis Guedj's The Parrot's Theorem, with its attempt to guide the reader through a mathematical jungle, Darren Aronosky's film Pi, which in its own crazy way finds interesting analogues for the phenomena of chaos it is purportedly talking about, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard's Hapgood or Arcadia, which find effective ways to blend theoretical with dramatic concerns, around major stories of physics and mathematics. But I have no good feeling for David Auburn's play Proof. It is a nice enough work, but how does a mathematician get into it -- its heroes could be chemists or physicists or biologists or literary historians, for all I know, the ‘great breakthrough' at the nucleus of the plot could be any x discovery in any y science. And although I rather enjoyed the film A Beautiful Mind, I think that although it told us rather interesting things about madness, it said absolutely nothing about John Nash's mathematics. ‘And why should it,' you may ask. Well, to me, obviously, because John Nash was a great mathematician. We had sexploitation. Now we also have math-ploitation.

In fact, to me the two works just mentioned functioned as cautionary tale, as I worked on Incompleteness, as models of what to avoid. For the more I worked on it, the more I realized that if a play about Kurt Gödel was to justify itself, and not be just about madness, anorexia, or the hospital system, then the mathematics, the Theorem of Incompleteness itself, had to play a central role in it. Putting Kurt Gödel last days on the stage and treating him as nothing but a weird psychiatric case (after all, not all old men who become paranoid about food in their last years are geniuses) was to me a task not worth the man it was supposed to serve. I did not want to do another A Beautiful Mind — by the way, I am here referring to the film and not the book, which presents a very well-rounded picture of John Nash's life and troubles.