Tarski, Alfred [addendum]
Alfred Tarski was born in 1901 (not 1902, as stated in the original entry). The name on his birth certificate was Alfred Teitelbaum (variant: Tajtelbaum); he changed it to Alfred Tarski in 1924. That same year his dissertation, written under the direction of Stanisław Lesńiewski, was published in two parts, the first under his birth name and the second under Alfred Tajtelbaum-Tarski; thereafter, all his articles and books were published under the name Alfred Tarski.
Tarski's immigration to the United States was somewhat accidental: He was attending a meeting of the Unity of Science at Harvard University in September 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland and World War II began. Tarski was stranded and separated from his wife and two children, who were left behind in Warsaw (they were reunited after the war, but most of his family perished in the Holocaust). In 1942, after three years of casting about for a position, he received a one-year appointment as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), from which he quickly rose to professor of mathematics in 1946. Working intensively with increasing success, he built a substantial graduate program in logic and, within a decade, Berkeley became a mecca for logicians worldwide. In 1957 Tarski was instrumental in creating the interdepartmental Program in Logic and Methodology of Science at UCB that mainly bridged the departments of mathematics and philosophy.
Tarski retired in 1968 but was recalled to teach for the next five years. He continued to do research and advise students until a year before his death in 1983. In the last decade of his life he received a number of honors, including honorary doctorates from the Universidad Católica de Chile, the Université d'Aix-Marseille II, and the University of Calgary; in addition, in 1981 he was awarded the Berkeley Citation, the highest honor that UCB can bestow. For a full biography see Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman (2004).
From the 1960s to the end of his life, with the collaboration of colleagues and students, Tarski concentrated on the topics of axiomatic geometry and algebraic logic, while continuing to contribute to the areas of model theory, set theory, and universal algebra. His work on first-order systems of Euclidean geometry and the work that it led to in non-Euclidean geometry is described in a joint article with Steven R. Givant, "Tarski's System of Geometry" (1999). The research on relation algebra was capped by the joint monograph with Givant, A Formalization of Set Theory without Variables in 1987. In that it is shown how a wide variety of formal theories in the first-order predicate calculus, including set theory, can be axiomatized equivalently in purely quantifier-free relation-algebraic terms, even though those do not suffice in general to axiomatize first-order logic. The work on the algebraization of the full first-order logic with equality is exposited in the two substantial volumes of Cylindric Algebras (1971–1985), written in collaboration with Leon Henkin and Donald Monk.
Model Theory.
Bibliography
Works by Tarski
Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938. 2nd ed. Translated by J. H. Woodger, edited by John Corcoran. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983.
Collected Papers, Vols. 1–4, edited by Steven R. Givant and Ralph N. McKenzie. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1986.
Works by Tarski with Others
Henkin, Leon, Donald Monk, and Alfred Tarski. Cylindric Algebras. 2 vols. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971–1985.
Tarski, Alfred, and Steven R. Givant. A Formalization of Set Theory without Variables. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1987.
Tarski, Alfred, and Steven R. Givant. "Tarski's System of Geometry." Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 5 (1999): 175–214.
Works on Tarski
Feferman, Anita Burdman, and Solomon Feferman. Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Givant, Steven. "Bibliography of Alfred Tarski." Journal of Symbolic Logic 51 (4) (1986): 913–941.
Tarski's work is surveyed in a number of articles in the Journal of Symbolic Logic 51 (4) (1986) and 53 (1) (1988). There is a considerable secondary literature on Tarski's work, including the proceedings of the Tarski Centenary Conference held in Warsaw in 2001 that appeared in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 126 (1–3) (2004) and 127 (1–3) (2004).
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