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Part I: A sketch of Gentzen’s life and work

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Abstract

Gerhard Gentzen died on August 4, 1945, in a prison in Prague. His fellow prisoners were professors of the local German university, and there are accounts of his last days and how he was, rendered weak by lack of food, still pondering over the consistency problem of analysis. After the war, some attempts were made to find any manuscripts he might have left behind; a mythical suitcase one letter reports he had been carrying around, filled with papers with a near-proof of the consistency of analysis. Nothing was found, though, in Prague. In Göttingen, instead, there were manuscripts that were preliminary studies for published work, by the account of Arnold Schmidt. He wrote in 1948 to Gentzen’s mother that the papers would be placed and kept together with Hilbert’s papers; yet again, nothing has been found.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Incidentally, I had the occasion to ask in 2008 Dr. Ludwig Bernays why Paul Bernays didn’t request the restitution of his position after the war: “Oh, uncle Paul would never have done such a thing!”

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Jan von Plato

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von Plato, J. (2017). Part I: A sketch of Gentzen’s life and work. In: Saved from the Cellar. Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42120-9_1

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