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The greatest and in some sense heartbreaking admission of error I know of, is Frege's letter to Bertrand Russell:

https://sites.tufts.edu/histmath/files/2015/11/Frege-Letter-...

Russell himself says "As I think about acts of integrity and grace, there is nothing to compare with Frege's dedication for truth."

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This is beautiful and humbling. An example of a scientist who loved being wrong was Fred Hoyle. Quote: ‘it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right’.

> ‘it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right’

This is why fake news is such a hit ;)

Talkig of Russell, I can't imagine how he and Whitehead felt when the huge edifice of the Principia Mathemetica simply crumbled away under the onslaught of the incompleteness theorem.

I don't think it did. I'm sure they would have liked it if incompleteness didn't hold, but PM was influential in advancing mathematical logic, which is still going strong. What happened is that the system itself was supplanted by first order logic and set theory.

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