Kurt Gödel's private 'Max Phil' philosophical notebooks were written entirely in Gabelsberger shorthand and are still being transcribed decades after his death

Kurt Gödel's private philosophical notebooks — known as the "Max Phil" (Maximen Philosophie) notebooks, roughly 1,500 handwritten pages across fifteen volumes (one apparently lost), begun around 1934 and likely continuing to 1955 — were written entirely in Gabelsberger shorthand, "a notation system for German in common use among German and Austrian academics in the early part of the twentieth century" per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gödel learned the system in secondary school in Brünn (now Brno).

The notebooks are not a settled archive. Scholarly teams have been transcribing them, volume by volume, in the decades since Gödel's 1978 death — a project distinct from, but structurally identical to, the AI approach Christlein and Weichselbaumer are now building (see claim-christlein-weichselbaumer-gabelsberger-shorthand-ai-project): both treat Gödel's own handwriting as an unsolved decipherment problem, one by trained human transcribers, the other by machine-vision recognition.