Logical contributions to the Menger colloquium

Abstract

Apart from articles on set-theoretical topics, the eight volumes of Ergebnisse eines mathematischen Kolloquiums contain reports of sixteen contributions to the field of mathematical logic. Three other presentations on logical topics, entitled “Über einige fundamentale Begriffe der Metamathematik”, “Über die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls”, and “Bemerkungen von Freges und Russells Definition der Zahl”, are noted as having been delivered to the colloquium as well, during its eleventh, fifteenth and ninetieth sessions (20 February and 14 May, 1930, and 5 June 1935, respectively), but their contents were not published in the colloquium proceedings. In the first two cases, the speakers involved (Alfred Tarski and Kurt Gödel) presumably preferred that the results they discussed on those occasions appear in a journai having wider circulation¹. Whether the third contribution (by Friedrich Waismann) ever appeared elsewhere is unknown to this commentator. The question is worth exploring, especially in view of the tantalizing comment (volume 7, page 15 of these Ergebnisse) that the following discussion included remarks by Gödel, Menger and Tarski.