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Editorial Review Book Description
Alfred Tarski, one of the greatest logicians of all time, is widely thought of as 'the man who defined truth'. His mathematical work on the concepts of truth and logical consequence are cornerstones of modern logic, influencing developments in philosophy, linguistics and computer science. Tarski was a charismatic teacher and zealous promoter of his view of logic as the foundation of all rational thought, a bon-vivant and a womanizer, who played the 'great man' to the hilt. Born in Warsaw in 1901 to Jewish parents, he changed his name and converted to Catholicism, but was never able to obtain a professorship in his home country. A fortuitous trip to the United States at the outbreak of war saved his life and turned his career around, even while it separated him from his family for years. By the war's end he was established as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. There Tarski built an empire in logic and methodology that attracted students and distinguished researchers from all over the world. From the cafes of Warsaw and Vienna to the mountains and deserts of California, this first full length biography places Tarski in the social, intellectual and historical context of his times and presents a frank, vivid picture of a personally and professionally passionate man, interlaced with an account of his major scientific achievements. ... Read more Customer Reviews (12) 
Mathematics & Life
Fabulous!Alfred Tarski was one of the two greatest mathematical logicians of the twentieth century. (The other was Kurt Gödel.)Solomon Feferman, a student of Tarki's in the early fifties and a friend for over twenty years throughout the rest of Tarski's life, is himself one of most outstanding logicians of our day. Anita Feferman, Solomon Feferman's wife, is the author of the tremendously exciting biography of the logician and bodyguard to Leon Trotsky, Jean van Heijenoort: "From Trotsky to Gödel".(I know it's difficult to believe that a logician could also have been Trotsky's bodyguard; her book must be read to be believed!)
Clearly, this Tarski biography is a labor of love. I completely agree with those reviewers who have explained in detail why this book reads in places more like an exciting novel than a mere biography. What I found very impressive was the beautiful, delicate balance of the book between Tarski's mathematical accomplishments on the one hand and the daily features of his personal life on the other. He was not just a mathematician but rather a force of nature, a tornado, who swept everyone around him in his wake. Students, other mathematicians, university administrators, friends, colleagues, and especially women were all pulled into his mathematical and personal whirlwind.
No praise would be excessive for this outstanding book!
Intriguing story - far beyond my expectation!
To be honest, I started reading this book with some suspicion.In the first place, I was neither a fan of Tarski nor of S.Feferman.Though I did regard Tarski as one of the intellectual giants in the 20th century, I still frowned at the book's opening description of him as one of the "greatest" logicians of all time - on a par with my own hero Godel.My feeling towards S.Feferman was similarly ambivalent.In spite of his substantial contribution as the editor-in-chief of Godel's Collected Works and the universal praise he has received for that project, its end-result (the project was abandoned for running out of supports in 2005) is seriously lacking.For one thing, after almost 30 years' work the huge bulk of Godel's Nachlass in Gabelsberger (an almost extinct German shorthand) has been left unpublished (although approximately half of it has already been transcripted).It seems that more emphasis had been given by the editors and their colleague commentators on INTERPRETING Godel rather than making the inaccessible original material available to the wider public.I have always doubted the wisdom of Feferman's chief-editorship on this and other issues
Nevertheless, Feferman turns out to be a much more successful co-biographer of Tarski than an editor of Godel.The Tarski book goes far beyond my expectation.I simply couldn't put it down and went without sleeps for several nights until my eyes could no longer tolerate my indulgence.The reading has made Tarski an immensely more interesting figure to me - almost as interesting and intriguing as the enigmatic Godel.This aftermath is something which I could never have anticipated in my wildest dreams beforehand.
Since I agree with much of the praises from the Amazon Editorial and Customer Reviews of the book, I don't think it desirable to re-enumerate the book's various merits which others have already done.Needless to say, the book is not perfect and leaves much that is desired unaccounted.For one thing, although the book does present an interesting picture of the development of logic in the last century, it is presented from the Fefermans' highly personalized viewpoint and very one-sided.For example, from the book the reader will only get a very uninformed idea of the development of set theory which happens to be both Tarski's lifelong "hobby" and a source of intellectual uneasiness since he had a certain (though ambivalent perhaps, for he sometimes spoke in a Platonist tone) nominalist temperament while set theory is prima facie concerned with highly transfinite objects and often pursued by pronounced "realists" like Cantor, Zermelo, Godel (who was in effect described insane when Tarski declared himself as "the greatest living sane logician" ) et al.It is arguable that similar tension should also occur in Model Theory where Tarski reigned.But there is no discussion on this issue.It will also be interesting to know how Tarski reacted towards the epoch-making invention of forcing by P.Cohen in 1963, when the former was still an active researcher.The Fefermans say almost nothing on this either, although S.Feferman himself was one of the earliest developers of forcing immediately after Cohen.My own conjecture is that, like Godel, Tarski did not take forcing to be FUNDAMENTAL.Godel almost had a proof of the independence of the axiom of choice in the 1940s, but he abandoned the project partly because he did not want to encourage other logicians to plunge into a pursuit of independence proofs instead of trying to discover and develop new, further TRUE axioms of mathematics.Presumably the nominalist (by lips?) Tarski will perceive the issue very differently from the Platonist Godel.Yet the book gives us little clues about such and various other issues.
Paradoxically, it is precisely from the frankly personalized and unsystematic viewpoints of the Fefermans and other intimates of Tarski that we find much that is valuable.Moreover, unlike the Godel case, the authors did not forget to let the protagonist to present himself.And in spite of its moderate length and lack of comprehensiveness the book does manage to weave abundant insights into their captivating story of this intriguing man who is, given all his unconventional acts and deeds notwithstanding, first and foremost "powered by his ideas" (as Peter Hoffman puts it) with an extraordinary self-confidence throughout his life.It is amidst this web of insights that we are granted some of those very rare glimpses into the mind of a genius that so few biographers have ever accomplished.
truth is in the eye of the phd student!?
unlike all the previous praises this book seems to have gotten, i was not impressed by it. the book is an account of tarski the academician as seen/experienced by his phd students one of whom is the co-author himself.
the book is an account of tarski's academic life which is apparently believed to be best reflected through his students' eyes. this account fails to put in anything else. even what his son and daughter have to say is missing for the most part. there are many things which go unexplained or unquestioned:
1. why was tarski so much into nature?
2. why was he obsessed with rigor and formality? just stating an observation and looking for the reasons of that observation makes the difference between a fact telling book on the verge of being a mere factoid and an intriguing/enriching one. this book is unfortunately as shallow as can be when it comes to some psychological assessments.
3. why was tarski a womanizer? was he really that or did he like portraying himself as one?
4. was he a tyrant and if so, why?
the authors make a huge deal out of the fact that he was a jew. can it be that this whole emphasis on his religious and ethnic origin is anachronic in nature? maybe he just did not care, really. why did he choose catholicism? just because? or was he so ambitious that he did not really have any ground rules at all? in the end, these questions all go unanswered.
giving 5 stars for such a shallow book is unwarranted and is an unjust blow to some successful biographies such as the enigma (about alan turing) crafted by andrew hodges.
a new Tarski
Feferman made a great work in this book to show another facet of Tarski's logic. Usually, Tarski is associated with set theory, notwithstanding his main interest was algebraic. He didn't trust to the set-theoretic concept of individual; as a matter of fact, in boolean algebras where's no individuals at all. It's a mereological point of view, according to which what it's given aren't the parts, but the whole. An atom is what we obtain, as a limit concept, dividing endlessy a corp. One of the first papers by Tarski was on the foundation of geometry assuming as a primitive entity that of sphere (i.e. the whole). And his latest book was again on the relational algebra. We must thank the polish logician for his research on this aresa: relational algebras, boolean algebras with operators, cylindric algebras, etc.
I don't agree with Feferman only on a point: this way to approach logic come to Tarski from Lesniewski and not from Kotarbinski. This is not the place, unfortunately, to discuss this matter.
At any rate, the book is delightful, precise but very easy to read.
Illogical Logicians
Here is an unlikely great read. An important slice of the intellectual history of the 20th century, a human tale of immigrant success in America, fascinating gossip about famous philosophers and logicians, and required reading for anybody seriously considering graduate work in mathematics or any other highly abstract discipline.
This book creates a very realistic picture of academic life in which high intellectual achievement and ordinary human (mis) behavior are strangely intermixed. The way scholarly communities form and disperse around ideas, historical circumstances and personalities came across in a way I found to be very gripping.
Tarski, a tiny Polish professor who meticulously fussed over precision and complete adherence to the rules of highly abstract "Formal Systems" was actually a boozer, abuser, drug user and schmoozer. He didn't live a Formal life. Married to a Polish Resistance fighter but even so himself a serial adulterer, he flourished and eventually died in Berkeley carried there by historical currents of violence and anti-Semitism.
The book introduces us to most of his colleagues and PhD students, a rare collection of brilliant eccentrics for the most part. Consider his PhD student Richard Montague: a respected Mathematician and Philosophy Professor, but also a real estate speculator, epicure, fixture in the Gay LA Noir scene and, ultimately, murder victim. A common theme in all this is that in logic the character of the work and the character of the workers do not harmonize in a way that most people would find to be intuitive or even plausible. These logicians are not logical. Bertrand Russell is another case in point. Godel, who appears in the book in cameo, is perhaps the exception. An alternative way to say the same thing: these scholars display perfect intellectual integrity and only average human moral and social integrity. So much for the heroic Attic view of philosophers. Nevertheless, they all come off as admirable in the sympathetic but still somewhat ambivalent treatment by the authors, who were social and professional associates of Tarski's.
Their kind of mathematical work seems to have been a kind of creative art conducted in a difficult and technically demanding medium. By people with "artistic" temperaments. Several anecdotes and characters in the Polish part of the story seem to reinforce this impression. The handsome and seemingly idealized painted portraits on the dust jacket painted by a contemporary Polish logician-artist emphasize this aspect of the tale.
Their subject, mathematical logic, may seem recondite and obscure, of no interest to the general reader. In fact, its development by such men as Godel, Turing and Tarski may well be one of the great intellectual triumphs of the last century. Among other things it was essential to the development of computers. And perhaps to the systems of control and thought which keep the current huge social and economic system intact. This is an ironic legacy for such a wonderful collection of mathematical bohemians (should I say Warsovians?) and free spirits.
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Perhaps the best written written elementary book of logic