BOOK REVIEW
The Man Who Defined Truth
Martin Davis
Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic. Anita Burdman Feferman and
Solomon Feferman. vi + 425 pp. Cambridge University Press, 2004. $35.
All people use logic in making their way through the world.
Scientists in particular use it in reasoning about relations among
experimental results and theoretical explanations. The first attempt
to make logic itself the subject of rational inquiry was by
Aristotle in his theory of the syllogism. The 19th-century English
mathematician George Boole saw how to transform Aristotelian
syllogistics into mathematics—specifically, a kind of algebra.
The German mathematician Gottlob Frege, followed by Bertrand
Russell, turned things around, making logic primary and seeing all
of mathematics as based on logic. During the 20th century, as logic
developed into a vibrant branch of mathematics, tension remained
between those two aspects of the field: logic as a part of
mathematics and logic as the foundation of mathematics.
Alfred Tarski, who became one of the great logicians of the 20th
century, was born in 1901 in Warsaw into a middle-class Jewish
family named Teitelbaum. Poland, one of the new states formed after
World War I, tended to treat its large Jewish population like an
alien presence. As an ambitious young man with a powerful
mathematical ability, Alfred found it necessary to shed his Jewish
identity to have any hope of an academic career. He changed his name
to Tarski and converted to Catholicism, the religion of the
majority. September 1939 found him in the United States for a
conference, and the German invasion of Poland separated him from his
wife and children. He accepted a position at the University of
California, Berkeley, although California seemed like the end of the
world to him. After the war his wife and children joined him, and
there he remained for the rest of his long, eventful life.
Tarski was a charismatic teacher who charmed his students, but he
demanded perfection and could be devastatingly abusive to those who
failed to measure up. His extensive amorous involvements, which were
hardly discreet, were apparently accepted by his loyal wife. He was
particularly attracted to clever, lively women and was not at all
inhibited in offering his attentions to his female students. When a
lover and former student arrived in Berkeley from Poland for a
year's sabbatical leave, Tarski thought nothing of installing her in
his home with his wife and two growing children, something his son
found hard to forgive. On another occasion, his wife did move out,
providing his latest conquest with details of house management.
His was a fascinating life, and the new biography Alfred Tarski:
Life and Logic covers it all. The authors are exceptionally
well qualified to tell his story: Solomon Feferman, who was one of
Tarski's doctoral students in the 1950s and is now on the faculty at
Stanford, is a superb logician in his own right, and independent
scholar and writer Anita Burdman Feferman, who is the author of a
biography of logician Jean van Heijenoort, also knew Tarski well.
The Fefermans (who are husband and wife) were personally acquainted
with many of the people they write about here, and they have
obtained some remarkably intimate information. The book is
beautifully written and a pleasure to read on a number of levels.
The atmosphere in which the young Tarski became a mathematician was
heady. The massive three volumes of Alfred North Whitehead and
Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, which claimed to
provide a logical foundation for all of mathematics, had been
published in 1910, 1912 and 1913. By the 1920s the abstract theory
of sets was playing an increasingly central role in certain branches
of mathematics. Mathematics in Poland was heavily influenced by the
confluence of those developments.
By the time of his arrival in the United States in 1939, Tarski had
some very significant accomplishments to his credit. Perhaps most
notorious was the Banach-Tarski "paradox," which is
described in the first of a series of six "Interludes"
that explain the background of Tarski's achievements. This theorem,
which Tarski and another Polish mathematician, Stefan Banach,
arrived at independently, states that a solid ball of any given size
(a pea, for example) can be decomposed into pieces that can be
reassembled to produce another ball of any other desired size (such
as the Sun). Because one would expect that the volumes of the pieces
would add up to the size of the original ball no matter how they
were rearranged, this seems flatly impossible. The "catch"
that furnishes a way out of the impasse is that the pieces are such
bizarrely complicated structures that no numerical volume can be
attached to them: They are "nonmeasurable" sets.
Another early achievement (only published much later) was a decision
procedure for sentences written in the language of the arithmetic of
real numbers. These are sentences that can be written using
variables ranging over the real numbers, using symbols for the
operations of addition and multiplication and for the relations of
equality and order (<), and finally, using the logical operations
of not, and, or, if …
then, and exists. Tarski produced an algorithm that
could determine of any such sentence whether or not it is true. This
feat is particularly striking because it has turned out that if the
variables are permitted to range over only the integers (instead of
all real numbers), no such decision procedure is possible.
For philosophers, Tarski's great achievement was his audacious
assault on the notion of truth. He was able, under suitable
conditions, to give a mathematically precise definition of what it
means to say that a given sentence of a language is true.
One of these conditions was that the language in question be
completely formalized—its syntax had to be so clearly
specified that one could say precisely just which utterances are
legitimate sentences. The other was that the sentence had to have a
well-defined semantics—the meaning of the
individual components of the sentence had to be given. The
metalanguage in which this truth definition is developed
is, in general, separate from the language whose true sentences are
being identified. As Kurt Gödel had shown, it is possible for a
language to function as its own metalanguage. But for this case,
Tarski was able to prove his famous theorem on the nondefinability
of truth: Under very general conditions, the notion of
"truth" of the sentences of a language cannot be defined
in that same language.
When logic is developed with the mercilessly rigorous syntax needed
for foundational purposes, the details are a bit ungainly and not at
all appealing to one who seeks elegance in mathematics. Tarski
always seemed to work on formulations of logical matters that could
hope to have the same elegance found elsewhere in mathematics. Some
of his early publications tried to frame logical inference in an
abstract general setting, hiding the messy details. In later years,
he went back to the algebraic roots of 19th-century logic; his
cylindrical algebras were to do for 20th-century logic
what Boole's algebra had done for more restricted logical systems.
A crucial aspect of Tarski's legacy is his influence as a teacher.
He was notoriously hard on his doctoral students. They were expected
to come to his house, stay into the morning hours in a closed,
smoke-filled room and help him with his research programs and
proposals. His students took longer to finish than most, because
Tarski seemed never to be convinced that enough had been done for a
dissertation. Nevertheless, his 24 students are a remarkable group
of outstanding, highly productive logicians. Despite the obstacles
they faced and surmounted, most of them have been greatly
appreciative of what they learned from Tarski and view him with real affection.
By any standards, Tarski was a great mathematician whose work has
influenced very many researchers. But perhaps his greatest
achievement was convincing the administration of the University of
California, Berkeley, that logic was important enough to justify the
resources he was demanding—resources that made it possible to
assemble a group of scholars who made the Department of Mathematics
at Berkeley a great world center for logic, a status it retains today.