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Jan Łukasiewicz
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Polish logician and philosopher (1878–1956)
Jan Łukasiewicz<br>Łukasiewicz in 1935<br>Born21 December 1878<br>Lemberg, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary<br>Died13 February 1956(1956-02-13) (aged 77)<br>Dublin, Ireland<br>EducationAlma materLemberg UniversityPhilosophical workEra20th-century philosophyRegionWestern philosophy<br>Polish philosophy
School<br>Lwów–Warsaw school<br>Analytic philosophyInstitutionsLemberg University<br>University of Warsaw<br>Royal Irish AcademyMain interests<br>Philosophical logic, mathematical logic, history of logicNotable ideas<br>Polish notation<br>Łukasiewicz logic<br>Łukasiewicz–Moisil algebra<br>Reductive reasoning
Jan Łukasiewicz (Polish: [ˈjan wukaˈɕɛvit͡ʂ] ⓘ; 21 December 1878 – 13 February 1956) was a Polish logician and philosopher who is best known for Polish notation and Łukasiewicz logic.[1] His work centred on philosophical logic, mathematical logic and history of logic.[2] He thought innovatively about traditional propositional logic, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle, offering one of the earliest systems of many-valued logic. Contemporary research on Aristotelian logic also builds on innovative works by Łukasiewicz, which applied methods from modern logic to the formalization of Aristotle's syllogistic.[3]
The Łukasiewicz approach was reinvigorated in the early 1970s in a series of papers by John Corcoran and Timothy Smiley that inform modern translations of Prior Analytics by Robin Smith in 1989 and Gisela Striker in 2009.[4] Łukasiewicz is regarded as one of the most important historians of logic.
Life<br>[edit]
He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) and was the only child of Paweł Łukasiewicz, a captain in the Austrian army, and Leopoldina, née Holtzer, the daughter of a civil servant. His family was Roman Catholic.[5]
He finished his gymnasium studies in philology and in 1897 went on to Lemberg University, where he studied philosophy and mathematics. He was a pupil of the philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski.[6]
In 1902, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree under the patronage of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, who gave him a special doctoral ring with diamonds.[7]
He spent three years as a private teacher, and in 1905, he received a scholarship to complete his philosophy studies at the University of Berlin and the University of Louvain in Belgium.[7]
Łukasiewicz continued studying for his habilitation qualification and in 1906 submitted his thesis to the University of Lemberg. That year, he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Lemberg, where he was eventually appointed Extraordinary Professor by Emperor Franz Joseph I. He taught there until the First World War.[7]
In 1915, he was invited to lecture as a full professor at the University of Warsaw, which the German occupation authorities had reopened after it had been closed down by the Tsarist government in the 19th century.[7]
In 1919, Łukasiewicz left the university to serve as Polish Minister of Religious Denominations and Public Education in Paderewski's government until 1920. Łukasiewicz led the development of a Polish curriculum replacing the Russian, German and Austrian curricula that had been used in partitioned Poland. The Łukasiewicz curriculum emphasized the early acquisition of logical and mathematical concepts.[citation needed]
In 1928, he married Regina Barwińska.[7]
He remained a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1920 until 1939, when the family house was destroyed by German bombs, and the university was closed by the German occupation. He had been a rector of the university twice during which Łukasiewicz and Stanisław Leśniewski had founded the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic, which was later made famous internationally by Alfred Tarski, who had been a student of Leśniewski.
During the start of the Second World War, he worked at the Warsaw Underground University. After the German occupation authorities had closed the university, he earned a meager living in the Warsaw city archive. His friendship with Heinrich Scholz (German professor of mathematical logic) helped him, too, and it was Scholz who arranged for the Łukasiewicz family's passage to Germany in 1944 (Łukasiewicz was fearful of the Red Army advance). As it became increasingly clear that Germany would lose the war, Łukasiewicz and his wife tried to move to Switzerland, but were unable to get permission from the German...