Tarski

The Polish-American logician Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) was born Alfred Teitelbaum in Warsaw; he changed his surname to Tarski in 1924. That same year he obtained his doctorate at the University of Warsaw for a thesis in logic under the supervision of Stanisław Leśniewski; he had also studied under Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Stefan Mazurkiewicz and Wacław Sierpiński. At the University of Warsaw he was Docent and then Adjunct Professor from 1924 to 1939; simultaneously he taught in a high school from 1925 to 1939. From 1942 to his retirement in 1969 he held posts at the University of California at Berkeley.

Through his own work and that of his students, Tarski stands along with Aristotle and Frege as one of the creators of the discipline of logic. Andrzej Mostowski, Julia Robinson, Robert Vaught, Chen-Chung Chang, Solomon Feferman, Richard Montague, Jerome Keisler, and Haim Gaifman, among others...