alfred tarski
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Alfred Tarski (January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was
Life
Alfred Tarski was born Alfred Teitelbaum (Polish spelling: "Tajtelbaum"), to parents who were Polish
Jews in comfortable circumstances. He first manifested his mathematical abilities while in secondary
school, at Warsaw's Szkoła Mazowiecka.[3]
Nevertheless, he entered the University of Warsaw in 1918
intending to study biology.[4]
After Poland regained independence in 1918, Warsaw University came under the leadership of Jan
Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski and Wacław Sierpiński and quickly became a world-leading research
institution in logic, foundational mathematics, and the philosophy of mathematics. Leśniewski recognized
Tarski's potential as a mathematician and encouraged him to abandon biology.[4]
Henceforth Tarski
attended courses taught by Łukasiewicz, Sierpiński, Stefan Mazurkiewicz and Tadeusz Kotarbiński, and
became the only person ever to complete a doctorate under Leśniewski's supervision. Tarski and
Leśniewski soon grew cool to each other. However, in later life, Tarski reserved his warmest praise
for Kotarbiński, as was mutual.
In 1923, Alfred Teitelbaum and his brother Wacław changed their surname to "Tarski." (Years later, Alfred
met another Alfred Tarski in northern California.) The Tarski brothers also converted to Roman
Catholicism, Poland's dominant religion. Alfred did so even though he was an avowedatheist.[5]
Tarski
was a Polish nationalist who saw himself as a Pole and wished to be fully accepted as such - later, in
America, he spoke Polish at home.
After becoming the youngest person ever to complete a doctorate at Warsaw University, Tarski taught
logic at the Polish Pedagogical Institute, mathematics and logic at the University, and served as
Łukasiewicz's assistant. Because these positions were poorly paid, Tarski also taught mathematics at a
Warsaw secondary school;[6]
before World War II, it was not uncommon for European intellectuals of
research caliber to teach high school. Hence between 1923 and his departure for the United States in
1939, Tarski not only wrote several textbooks and many papers, a number of them ground-breaking, but
also did so while supporting himself primarily by teaching high-school mathematics. In 1929 Tarski
married fellow teacher Maria Witkowska, a Pole of Catholic background. She had worked as a courier for
the army in the Polish-Soviet War . They had two children; a son Jan who became a physicist, and adaughter Ina who married the mathematician Andrzej Ehrenfeucht.
[7]
Tarski applied for a chair of philosophy at Lwów University, but on Bertrand Russell's recommendation it
was awarded to Leon Chwistek[citation needed ]
. In 1930, Tarski visited the University of Vienna, lectured
to Karl Menger 's colloquium, and met Kurt Gödel. Thanks to a fellowship, he was able to return to Vienna
during the first half of 1935 to work with Menger's research group. From Vienna he traveled to Paris to
present his ideas on truth at the first meeting of the Unity of Science movement, an outgrowth of
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the Vienna Circle. In 1937, Tarski applied for a chair at Poznań University but the chair was
abolished.[8]
Tarski's ties to the Unity of Science movement saved his life, because they resulted in his
being invited to address the Unity of Science Congress held in September 1939 at Harvard University.
Thus he left Poland in August 1939, on the last ship to sail from Poland for the United States before
the German and Soviet invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. Tarski left reluctantly,
because Leśniewski had died a few months before, creating a vacancy which Tarski hoped to fil l.Oblivious to the Nazi threat, he left his wife and children in Warsaw. He did not see them again until 1946.
During the war, nearly all his extended family died at the hands of the German occupying authorities.
Once in the United States, Tarski held a number of temporary teaching and research positions: Harvard
University (1939), City College of New York (1940), and thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton (1942), where he again met Gödel. In 1942, Tarski joined the
Mathematics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent the rest of his career.
Tarski became an American citizen in 1945.[9]
Although emeritus from 1968, he taught until 1973 and
supervised Ph.D. candidates until his death.[10]
At Berkeley, Tarski acquired a reputation as an awesome
and demanding teacher, a fact noted by many observers:
His seminars at Berkeley quickly became famous in the world of mathematical logic. His students, many
of whom became distinguished mathematicians, noted the awesome energy with which he would coax
and cajole their best work out of them, always demanding the highest standards of clarity and
precision.[11]
Tarski was extroverted, quick-witted, strong-willed, energetic, and sharp-tongued. He preferred his
research to be collaborative — sometimes working all night with a colleague — and was very fastidious
about priority.[12]
A charismatic leader and teacher, known for his brilliantly precise yet suspenseful expository style, Tarski
had intimidatingly high standards for students, but at the same time he could be very encouraging, and
particularly so to women — in contrast to the general trend. Some students were frightened away, but a
circle of disciples remained, many of whom became world-renowned leaders in the field.[13]
Tarski supervised twenty-four Ph.D. dissertations including (in chronological order) those of Andrzej
Mostowski, Bjarni Jónsson, Julia Robinson, Robert Vaught, Solomon Feferman, Richard
Montague, James Donald Monk, Haim Gaifman, Donald Pigozzi and Roger Maddux, as well as Chen
Chung Chang and Jerome Keisler , authors of Model Theory (1973),[14]
a classic text in the field.[15][16]
He
also strongly influenced the dissertations of Alfred Lindenbaum, Dana Scott, and Steven Givant. Five of
Tarski's students were women, a remarkable fact given that men represented an overwhelming majority
of graduate students at the time.[16]
Tarski lectured at University College, London (1950, 1966), the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris (1955),
the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science in Berkeley (1958 –1960), the University of California at
Los Angeles (1967), and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (1974 –75).