- Jan Łukasiewicz
Jan Łukasiewicz (pronounced|ˈjan wukaˈɕɛvʲitʂ) (
21 December ,1878 –13 February ,1956 ) was a Polishmathematician born inLemberg , Galicia,Austria-Hungary (nowLviv ,Ukraine ). His major mathematical work centred onmathematical logic . He thought innovatively about traditionalpropositional logic , the principle ofnon-contradiction and thelaw of excluded middle .Life and work
To Łukasiewicz we owe a number of axiomatizations of classical
propositional logic . A particularly elegant axiomatization features a mere threeaxioms and is still invoked down to the present day. He was a pioneer investigator ofmulti-valued logic s; his three-valued propositional calculus, introduced in 1917, was the first explicitly axiomatized non-classical logical calculus. He wrote on thephilosophy of science . His approach to the making of scientific theories was similar to the thinking ofKarl Popper .Łukasiewicz invented the
Polish notation (named after his nationality) for the logical connectives around 1920. This notation is the root of the idea of the "recursive stack", a last-in, first-out computer memory store proposed by several researchers including Turing, Bauer and Hamblin, and first implemented in 1957. This design led to the English Electric multi-programmed KDF9 computer system of 1963, which had two such hardware register stacks. A similar concept underlies thereverse Polish notation ("RPN", a postfix notation) of the Friden EC-130 calculator and its successors, manyHewlett Packard calculators, the Forth programming language, or thePostScript page description language.Łukasiewicz was a devout
Roman Catholic . During the occupation of Poland in WW2 he worked in the secret Warsaw Underground University (Tajny Uniwersytet Warszawski). At the end of the war he was living in Hembsen, where he had been brought for his own safety.Chronology
*1878 Born
*1890-1902 Studies withKazimierz Twardowski in Lemberg (Lwów, L'viv)
*1902 Doctorate (mathematics and philosophy), University of Lemberg with the highest distinction possible
*1906Habilitation thesis completed, University of Lemberg (Lwów, L'viv)
*1906 Becomes a lecturer
*1910 essays on the principle of non-contradiction and the excluded middle
*1911 extraordinary professor at Lemberg (Lwów, L'viv)
*1915 invited to the newly reopened University of Warsaw
*1916 new Kingdom ofPoland declared
*1917 Develops three-valued propositional calculus
*1919 Polish Minister of Education
*1920-1939 professor atWarsaw University founds withStanisław Leśniewski theLwów-Warsaw School of logic (see alsoAlfred Tarski ,Stefan Banach ,Hugo Steinhaus ,Zygmunt Janiszewski ,Stefan Mazurkiewicz )
*1928 marries Regina Barwińska
*1946 exile inBelgium
*1946 offered a chair by the University College Dublin
*1953 writes autobiography
*1956 Dies inDublin ee also
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27114 Lukasiewicz
*History of philosophy in Poland
*Łukasiewicz logic Further reading
*cite book |last=Łukasiewicz |first=Jan |authorlink=Jan Łukasiewicz | title=Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic | publisher=Oxford University Press | year=1957 Reprinted by Garland Publishing in 1987. ISBN 0824069242
*cite book |last=Łukasiewicz |first=Jan |authorlink=Jan Łukasiewicz | title=Elementy logiki matematycznej. | publisher=Warsaw , Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe | year=1958 | language=Polish |oclc=11322101
*cite book |last=Łukasiewicz |first=Jan |authorlink=Jan Łukasiewicz | title=Elements of Mathematical Logic. Translated from Polish by Olgierd Wojtasiewicz. | publisher=New York, Macmillan | year=1964 | copyright=1963 | language=English |oclc=671498
*cite book |last=Łukasiewicz |first=Jan |authorlink=Jan Łukasiewicz |editor=Ludwik Borkowski | title=Selected Works | publisher=North-Holland Pub. Co. | year=1970 |isbn=0720422523 |oclc=115237
*cite book |title=Aristotle & Łukasiewicz on the Principle of Contradiction |first=Frederick |last=Seddon |authorlink=Frederick Seddon |publisher=Ames, Iowa: Modern Logic Pub. |year=1996 |isbn=1884905048 |oclc=37533856
*cite book |title=Philosophical Logic in Poland |first=Jan |last=Wolenski |authorlink=Jan Wolenski |publisher=Kluwer Academic Publishers |year=1994 |isbn=0792322932 |oclc=27938071External links
* [http://www.fmag.unict.it/~polphil/PolPhil/Lukas/Lukas.html Polish Philosophy Page: Jan Łukasiewicz]
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*MathGenealogy |id=13346
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