Abstract
In the summer of 1957 at Cornell University the first of a cavalcade of large-scale meetings partially or completely devoted to logic took place—the five-week long Summer Institute for Symbolic Logic. That meeting turned out to be a watershed event in the development of logic: it was unique in bringing together for such an extended period researchers at every level in all parts of the subject, and the synergetic connections established there would thenceforth change the face of mathematical logic both qualitatively and quantitatively.
It is a pleasure on this occasion to express my thanks to Jan Wolenski both for his personal assistance and for his extensive historical and analytical work on logic and philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw school, which has been invaluable to our work on the Tarski biography.
The material for this article is to be part of a chapter for a biography of Alfred Tarski, under preparation with Anita Burdman Feferman. All rights are reserved to the author.
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Notes
See Hourya Sinaceur, ‘Address at the Princeton University Bicentennial Conference on Problems of Mathematics’ (December 17–19, 1946), by Alfred Tarski’, The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 6 (2000), 1–44.
The scheduled 1940 ICM meeting, to which Tarski had first been invited, was cancelled due to the war.
Paul Halmos, I Want to be a Mathematician. An Automathography, New-York: Springer-Verlag (1985), p. 215.
Letter from Halmos to Hewitt dated 13 September 1955 in the Tarski archives of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The letter is quoted at greater length in Joseph W. Dauben, Abraham Robinson, Princeton, Princeton University Press (1995), pp. 232–233.
Letter from Tarski and Henkin to Hewitt dated 26 September 1955 in the Tarski archives. The letter is quoted at greater length in Dauben (ibid.), p. 233.
The complete committee correspondence is to be found in folder 13.5 of the Tarski archives.
Incidentally, this was the only text reproduced in full in the summaries of talks.
Though identified as Tarski’s students, neither Butler nor Scott ended up obtaining their Ph.D. degrees with him; Scott had, by the time of the Cornell meeting, completed his doctoral work under the direction of Church in Princeton, while Butler obtained her Ph.D. somewhat later, working with Victor Klee of the University of Washington.
Robinson left Germany for Palestine with his family in the early 30s, came to France to study in 1939, fled to England in 1940, and ended up at the University of Toronto in 1951 where he stayed until 1957. See Dauben (ibid.) for a full biography of Abraham Robinson.
Kreisel was sent from Austria to England by his parents in the late 30s, studied at Cambridge, and was a Lecturer at the University of Reading for most of the 1950s. See Piergiorgio Odifreddi (ed.), Kreiseliana: About and Around Georg Kreisel, Wellesley, A. K. Peters (1996), p. xiii, for Kreisel’s vita, as well as for other articles in that volume containing biographical information.
It turned out much later that Gödel had already lectured on the functional interpretation in 1941; his own publication of these results did not take place until 1958. See Solomon Feferman, In the Light of Logic, New York, Oxford University Press (1998), Ch. 11, for further information as to its development.
Cf. Charles N. Delzell, ‘Kreisel’s unwinding of Artin’s proof’, in: Odifreddi (1996), pp. 113–246.
This incident was recently recalled to me by Martin Davis (in an e-mail message, 17 September 2000).
An isol is a recursive equivalence type of sets which are either finite or have no recursively enumerable subset.
Interview with Hilary Putnam in Berkeley 25 April 1995. Putnam added that none of Tarski’s students came to his defense on that occasion.
Personal communication (e-mail message of 7 October 2000).
Cf. Robin Gandy, ‘The confluence of ideas in 1936’, in: Rolf Herken (ed.), The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, Oxford, Oxford University Press (1988), pp. 55–111.
The problem was solved independently by the Russian mathematician A. A. Muchnik.
Cf. Paul N. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, Cambridge, MIT Press (1999).
Personal communication (e-mail message of 29 September 2000).
A full survey of this development and its applications is to be found in B. F. Caviness and J. R. Johnson (eds.), Quantifier Elimination and Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition, Wien, Springer (1998).
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Feferman, S. (2003). Alfred Tarski and a Watershed Meeting in Logic: Cornell, 1957. In: Hintikka, J., Czarnecki, T., Kijania-Placek, K., Placek, T., Rojszczak, A. (eds) Philosophy and Logic in Search of the Polish Tradition. Synthese Library, vol 323. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0249-2_11
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