Alfred Tarski

University of California, Berkeley

January 14, 1901 - October 27, 1983


Scientific Discipline: Mathematics
Membership Type:
Member (elected 1965)

Alfred Tarski was a renowned logician, mathematician, and philosopher who changed the way logic and truth were interpreted within the mathematical and philosophical communities.  He was responsible for the creation of the theory of models, which has become one of the four major fields of research in mathematical logic.  Although he was best known for his work as a logician, he published over 300 different scholarly papers contributing to the advancement of set theory, measure theory, model theory, abstract algebra, point-set topology, analytical philosophy, and several others.  He has been called one of the four greatest logicians of all time (Aristotle, Gottlob Frege, and Kurt Gödel being the other three).  Along with Stefan Banach, Tarski theorized that a ball could be dissembled into a finite number of pieces which could either be reconstructed to form a ball larger than the original or to form two balls that equaled the mass of the original ball.  This became known as the Banach-Tarski paradox.  He also developed a general axiomatic treatment of formal deductive systems that unified previous studies and enhanced our understanding of Boolean algebras.  Concerning his research as a logician, Tarski proved that a machine capable of answering every question within elementary Euclidean geometry could be created, but that no machine could be created for various other mathematical theories.  In 1935, Tarski produced a mathematical definition of truth for formal, or symbolic, languages, which earned him the title of “the man who defined truth.”  This definition had a revolutionary influence on modern philosophy and mathematics.

Tarski was a Polish immigrant. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Warsaw in 1924.  He taught at different institutions throughout Warsaw from 1922 to 1939 before he came to the United States to give a lecture tour as a visiting professor.  Due to the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939, Tarski was unable to return home and remained in America.  After teaching for a couple years at Harvard University, the College of the City of New York, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, he became a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley from 1942 until his retirement in 1968.  For his innumerable contributions to mathematics and philosophy, Tarski received several awards.  Among a few of his noted honors were the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1935, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1941-1942 and 1955-1956, the Fulbright award in 1954, and the Millennium Award in Arts and Sciences from the Alfred Jurzykoski Foundation in 1966.  In 1960, he was the Chairman of the First International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science and was invited to lecture for the first and second congressional meetings.  

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