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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).