18 Facts About Thoralf Skolem

Thoralf Skolem attended secondary school in Kristiania, passing the university entrance examinations in 1905.

Thoralf Skolem then entered Det Kongelige Frederiks Universitet to study mathematics, taking courses in physics, chemistry, zoology and botany.

In 1913, Thoralf Skolem passed the state examinations with distinction, and completed a dissertation titled Investigations on the Algebra of Logic.

Thoralf Skolem traveled with Birkeland to the Sudan to observe the zodiacal light.

Thoralf Skolem spent the winter semester of 1915 at the University of Gottingen, at the time the leading research center in mathematical logic, metamathematics, and abstract algebra, fields in which Skolem eventually excelled.

Thoralf Skolem later changed his mind and submitted a thesis in 1926, titled Some theorems about integral solutions to certain algebraic equations and inequalities.

Thoralf Skolem continued to teach at Det kongelige Frederiks Universitet until 1930 when he became a Research Associate in Chr.

Thoralf Skolem served as president of the Norwegian Mathematical Society, and edited the Norsk Matematisk Tidsskrift for many years.

Thoralf Skolem remained intellectually active until his sudden and unexpected death.

Thoralf Skolem published around 180 papers on Diophantine equations, group theory, lattice theory, and most of all, set theory and mathematical logic.

Thoralf Skolem mostly published in Norwegian journals with limited international circulation, so that his results were occasionally rediscovered by others.

Thoralf Skolem published a proof in 1927, but Emmy Noether independently rediscovered it a few years later.

Thoralf Skolem pioneered the construction of non-standard models of arithmetic and set theory.

Thoralf Skolem refined Zermelo's axioms for set theory by replacing Zermelo's vague notion of a "definite" property with any property that can be coded in first-order logic.

The completeness of first-order logic is a corollary of results Thoralf Skolem proved in the early 1920s and discussed in Thoralf Skolem, but he failed to note this fact, perhaps because mathematicians and logicians did not become fully aware of completeness as a fundamental metamathematical problem until the 1928 first edition of Hilbert and Ackermann's Principles of Mathematical Logic clearly articulated it.

Thoralf Skolem distrusted the completed infinite and was one of the founders of finitism in mathematics.

Thoralf Skolem often seemed to present proofs in the same order as he came to discover them.

Thoralf Skolem was very much a 'free spirit': he did not belong to any school, he did not found a school of his own, he did not usually make heavy use of known results.