Alfred Tarski 1901 – 1983
Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher and one of the founders of modern mathematical logic and model theory. After his early career in the Lwow-Warsaw school of analytic philosophy, he was stranded in the United States by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and spent the rest of his life at the University of California, Berkeley, where he trained generations of logicians. His Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages set out the celebrated semantic conception of truth, while his Decision Method for Elementary Algebra and Geometry and his extensive work in set theory and metamathematics shaped the discipline.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Polish-American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Snow is white if and only if snow is white.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Truth in a formalized language can be defined by recursion on the structure of its sentences.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Logic must distinguish object language from metalanguage to escape the liar.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“A theory may admit several non-isomorphic models, each as legitimate as the others.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Decidability is the dream and rarely the reality of formal systems.”