29 March 2005 Read "Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic"
Over Easter I finished reading the recent, excellent biography "Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic" written by Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman. It is a first-class biography of a logician whose life and work will be of interest to the couple of readers of this diary. I strongly encourage all of you to buy the book, and read it. It is a work of love in which Solomon Feferman pays tribute to his former teacher.
The book paints a very lively portrait of a larger-then-life man, but it is not an eulogy and is all the better for this! Indeed, the Fefermans make it clear that Tarski used amphetamine-like stimulants his whole career, that he was also a tireless womanizer (who had his fair share of affairs with some of his comparatively many female PhD students), that he was jealous of the success of others and a shameless self promoter.
Some of his PhD students took up to twenty years (no joke!) to complete their degree since the standards he was setting were very high, and he was using them as editors and proof readers for his own books and papers. I will never forget the description of Giovanni Sambin's experience of Tarski's seminar, and the effect it had on his future career.
It was a humbling experience to read about Tarski's achievements, and I'll report on some quotations from the book over the next few days. For the moment, let me just remark that in the fifteen years following his PhD, Tarski wrote more than fifty papers, wrote his great monograph on the concept of truth in formalized languages, the first version of his introductory text on logic and a geometry textbook for high-school students. All of this, while he was teaching thirty hours a week in a high-school and had a docent position at Warsaw University. Reading this, I sympathized with the authors' cry: "How on earth did he accomplish as much as he did and still have time for an active social life, too?" The answer given by the Fefermans is: "He was limitlessly energetic, enthusiastic, organized, aggressive, and competitive, and he had an iron constitution." Simple, isn't it?
Happy reading!
Last modified: Tuesday, 29-Mar-2005 18:21:03 CEST.