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Elliott Mendelson, Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman. Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. vi + 435. ISBN 0-521-80240-7., Philosophia Mathematica, Volume 13, Issue 2, June 2005, Pages 231–232, https://doi.org/10.1093/philmat/nki020
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Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) was considered by many to be one of the top two logicians of the twentieth century. It was reported to the authors by the logician John Corcoran that Tarski once referred to himself as ‘the greatest living sane logician’, presumably so as to eliminate from contention his chief rival, Kurt Gödel. This quotation is typical of the items of gossip that academics love to hear and that are served up plentifully in this lively biography, along with a large number of interesting photographs.
Tarski was born and grew up in Warsaw, where he obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1924 with a thesis, ‘On the Primitive Term of Logistic’, having to do with a logical system of his advisor, Stanislaus Leśniewski. For the next fifteen years, he pursued his research while earning a modest living from his positions as a teacher in a Warsaw lycée and an adjunct professor at the university and from research grants. When Germany began World War II with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Tarski was stranded in the United States during a brief tour to give lectures and to attend a Unity of Science Conference in Cambridge. Although this probably saved his life, it turned out that he would be separated from his wife and two small children in Poland until 1946. After a term teaching at CCNY and a year doing research at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, he was appointed in 1942 to the Department of Mathematics of the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained, except for a few visiting positions at other universities, until his death forty-one years later. The authors are able to give a thorough and intimate picture of Tarski's academic career, research, and private life because Sol Feferman attended Berkeley from 1948 through 1955, where he studied with Tarski, Leon Henkin, and others and officially obtained his doctorate under Tarski's supervision in 1957. At that time, he was already on the faculty at Stanford, where he has distinguished himself as one of the leading American logicians. His co-author and wife, Anita, is a writer, who has previously published a biography of the logician and political activist, Jean van Heijenoort. The book is made accessible to the general reader by virtue of the fact that the authors concentrate on the personal and academic aspects of Tarski's life, rather than technical details. The principal exceptions involve his work on the completeness and decidability of elementary algebra and geometry and his work on the concept of truth, which the authors regard as his most important contributions, but even here the subjects are not treated in great depth. Of course, the general description of Tarski's activities often requires mention of other research in which he was engaged, and the authors also emphasize the broad range of his interests (for example, botanical, artistic, and political). He generally avoided issues in the philosophy of mathematics, except with respect to the concept of truth. Although staying away from philosophical discussions in his papers, he privately expressed nominalist views (p. 52), characterizing classical logic and set theory as ‘fairy tales’ and his work on them as a ‘hobby’.
