Wismar

A quiet Hanseatic port on the Baltic, birthplace of Gottlob Frege, who left it young and spent his career in Jena inventing the logic that underlies modern mathematics.

Wismar was a Hanseatic port on the Baltic with brick gables and a harbour that had seen better centuries. Frege was born there in 1848 into a schoolmaster's family and left for Jena, where he spent his entire career without ever rising far. He published the Begriffsschrift in 1879, which invented modern logic, and almost nobody read it. Recognition arrived from Russell, and it came in the same letter that showed his system was inconsistent.