31 Facts About Alfred Tarski

Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician and mathematician.

Alfred Tarski was born Alfred Teitelbaum, to parents who were Polish Jews in comfortable circumstances.

Alfred Tarski's thesis was entitled O wyrazie pierwotnym logistyki.

However, in later life, Alfred Tarski reserved his warmest praise for Kotarbinski, which was reciprocated.

The Alfred Tarski brothers converted to Roman Catholicism, Poland's dominant religion.

Alfred Tarski did so even though he was an avowed atheist.

In 1929 Alfred Tarski married fellow teacher Maria Witkowska, a Pole of Catholic background.

Alfred Tarski applied for a chair of philosophy at Lwow University, but on Bertrand Russell's recommendation it was awarded to Leon Chwistek.

In 1930, Alfred Tarski visited the University of Vienna, lectured to Karl Menger's colloquium, and met Kurt Godel.

In 1937, Alfred Tarski applied for a chair at Poznan University but the chair was abolished.

Alfred Tarski left reluctantly, because Lesniewski had died a few months before, creating a vacancy which Alfred Tarski hoped to fill.

Once in the United States, Alfred Tarski held a number of temporary teaching and research positions: Harvard University, City College of New York, and thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he again met Godel.

In 1942, Alfred Tarski joined the Mathematics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent the rest of his career.

At Berkeley, Alfred Tarski acquired a reputation as an astounding and demanding teacher, a fact noted by many observers:.

Alfred Tarski strongly influenced the dissertations of Alfred Lindenbaum, Dana Scott, and Steven Givant.

Five of Alfred Tarski's students were women, a remarkable fact given that men represented an overwhelming majority of graduate students at the time.

Alfred Tarski lectured at University College, London, the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris, the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science in Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Alfred Tarski's collected papers run to about 2,500 pages, most of them on mathematics, not logic.

In 1941, Alfred Tarski published an important paper on binary relations, which began the work on relation algebra and its metamathematics that occupied Alfred Tarski and his students for much of the balance of his life.

However, Alfred Tarski often expressed great admiration for Charles Sanders Peirce, particularly for his pioneering work in the logic of relations.

Alfred Tarski produced axioms for logical consequence and worked on deductive systems, the algebra of logic, and the theory of definability.

Around 1930, Alfred Tarski developed an abstract theory of logical deductions that models some properties of logical calculi.

Alfred Tarski objected to restricting the role of metamathematics to the foundations of mathematics.

Alfred Tarski's 1936 article "On the concept of logical consequence" argued that the conclusion of an argument will follow logically from its premises if and only if every model of the premises is a model of the conclusion.

In 1936, Alfred Tarski published Polish and German versions of a lecture he had given the preceding year at the International Congress of Scientific Philosophy in Paris.

Whether Alfred Tarski's notion was entirely the modern one turns on whether he intended to admit models with varying domains.

Alfred Tarski ends by pointing out that his definition of logical consequence depends upon a division of terms into the logical and the extra-logical and he expresses some skepticism that any such objective division will be forthcoming.

Mautner, and possibly an article by the Portuguese mathematician Sebastiao e Silva, anticipated Alfred Tarski in applying the Erlangen Program to logic.

Alfred Tarski's proposal was to demarcate the logical notions by considering all possible one-to-one transformations of a domain onto itself.

In some ways the present proposal is the obverse of that of Lindenbaum and Alfred Tarski, who proved that all the logical operations of Bertrand Russell's and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica are invariant under one-to-one transformations of the domain onto itself.

In essence, this suggestion circumvents the difficulty Alfred Tarski's proposal has in dealing with a sameness of logical operation across distinct domains of a given cardinality and across domains of distinct cardinalities.