Customer Reviews

Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic

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This is one of the best scientific biographies I've read. Alfred Tarski was not only an important figure in 20th century mathematics and philosophy, he was also an incredibly interesting and multi-faceted person. Anita Burdman Feferman and Sol Feferman paint a wonderful portrait of both Tarski, the man, and Tarski, the mathematician. Sol Feferman, himself an eminent logician and student of Tarski, provides insightful introductions to Tarski's main mathematical achievements in several "technical interludes." It is an easy read. The personal stories of Tarski's flight from Poland just before the Nazi invasion, his contacts with other noted 20th century philosophers, his influence on the development of logic and semantics, and details of his relationships with his students make for an engrossing, often moving, and always fascinating story.

Let me state unequivocally that I want to pour gushing lavish praise on this sublime biography. The Fefermans have crafted a wonderfully warm and inspirational account of Alfred Traski, his life and loves. Many biographies of great intellects remain trapped in awe of their subjects, hesitant about exploring their foibles at length and treating divergencies from the norm as eccentricities. This book is an admirable contrast to the standard hagiographical style. Be under no illusion here, you will read about Tarski's contributions to logic, but perhaps more interestingly you will explore the complex emotional and psychological world of Tarksi. His separation from his wife and children during WWII. His struggle to cope with impecuniary. Sexual proclivities. Shifting friendships. His step away from Judaism. The loyalty and antipathies he inspired. His humanity. The picture painted is complex and subtle.

In short this is one of the finest and most rewarding biographies I have ever read. When you read this book, bear in mind the debt owed to its authors. It is unlikely a book as fine as this will come around again in the near future.

This is a wonderful biography about an outstanding man. Alfred Tarski was more than just the ingenious logician, mathematician, and philosopher - he was an exceptional character; his life reflects a century of change. The Fefermans tell his story so vividly, I just could not help having the impression of reading a novel in which the protagonist had become alive.
We learn about the brilliant child of twelve who translates a German short story about a prisoner's playing cards with his executioner for the last time in his life. We see Tarski struggling with his Jewish ancestry when he reinvents himself by choosing the fantasy name "Tarski" in order to cope with the anti-semitic adverseness of pre-war Poland. We are present at the Bohemian parties in Zakopane, its poets and philosophers, where love is free and drugs are omnipresent. We set sail with Tarski who leaves for the US in order to speak at a conference, while Nazi Germany is only days before overrunning Poland and starting a war in which most of Tarski's relatives are to perish in the Holocaust. We understand how he must have felt, stranded in the US, worrying about his children and his wife who could not follow him, summer clothes and a suitcase as his sole possessions, yet still chasing after logic and love. We accompany him while he erects his logical empire in Berkeley, teaches and exploits the next generation's prodigies, smokes and works, always energetic and awake until every single early morning.
The Fefermans tell this story as if they were invisible observers; they do not invent anything, they do not force upon us their own perspective. It is sufficient for us to know that they have spent half of their lives next to Tarski, with Tarski, and perhaps sometimes even opposed to Tarski. In six marvelous interludes, Tarski's logical achievements are explained in clear and concise terms. Everyone interested in the fabulous constructions of a brilliant scientific mind will love these sections. I simply had a great time reading this book. I do not only recommend it to those who want to learn about Tarski, I recommend it to everyone intrigued by life and logic.

This is an incredibly well-written and inspiring book - an amazing testament to the intelligence, depth, and humanity of both the subject and the authors alike. Tarski's life, told interwoven with the glistening tales of his bright-eyed hopeful graduate students, friends, foes, and lovers, unfolds in such a way as to make those of us on the cusp of our graduate studies hark for an environment as rich with character dynamic and passion. With excelent, accessible technical notes interspersed throughout the work, this book is a wonderful read for anyone involved in mathematics. Even so, this book is much more than a story written for logicians and mathematicians. This is a book with themes so distinctly human and reaching as to make the whole story accessible and inspirational for anyone who might get his or her hands on it. I cannot recommend it enough. If Paul Hoffman's biography on Erdos ("The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth") made me want to study mathematics and logic as an undergraduate, the Fefermans' "Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic" made me want to devote my graduate studies to the subjects. Inspiring, indeed!

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 transcribed). 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 been able to reveal.

The book not only chronicles Tarski's public life, but gives one an intimate look at Tarski as a person, at the relationship to his wife, girlfriends, colleagues, and students. In addition, interludes introduce Tarski's work in philosophy, logic, and mathematics, and the historical context of Tarski's early years in Poland is made very vivid in a number of more historical excursions. It is a pleasure to read, and I can't recommend that you start reading it just before you have plans for dinner, or at least plans you can't change.

Tarski's life is on the one hand the story of great professional success and achievement. The young Tarski gets stranded in the US while attending a conference at Harvard, without his family, during the outbreak of World War II. After he is unable to find a good job at an East Coast university he has to move all the way out West at the looked down upon University of California at Berkeley, which he then turns into the world's center for mathematical logic. A large part of the next generation of logicians were either his students or his students students, and his work became a corner stone in the discipline. In Berkeley he is finally reunited with his wife and children after many years appart. They are among the few members of his family who survived the war.

But on the other hand Tarski as a person seems far from perfect. The most vivid story to me was C.C. Chang's account of Tarski waking his wife, by yelling from his office, to make him and Chang, one of Tarski's students, coffee at 2 am. And the stories of Tarski's relationship to his students, his demands that they solve the problems that he wanted solved, and his relationships to his female students and female junior colleagues, in particular, don't put him in a prettier light. But these parts of the biography of Tarski are among the most fascinating and intriguing. The book really shines here with many detailed accounts based on interviews with the people involved. Other highlights to my mind include the account of Tarski's struggle with his Jewish and Polish identities, and his eventual conversion to Catholicism. The story of the second half of his life closely mirrors the story of the development of mathematical logic in the US, and is fascinating in its own right, in particular to see how many threats lead back to Tarski.

This book is a joy to read and very rewarding. Whether or not you know about Tarski already, I think you will get a lot out of it.

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.

This is an amazing book, certainly one of the best biographies I've read. Alfred Tarski was a towering figure in 20th century mathematics. He also lived through tumultuous times, and he lead an extraordinary personal life. The man, his work, and the times he lived through are wonderfully brought to life in this very readable book.

The authors knew Tarski for more than 20 years. They also conducted extensive interviews with Tarski's colleagues, students, family members, and lovers. The result is an extraordinarily rich portrait.

This book demolishes absurd myths about mathematicians, that they are dull in personality, possess mechanistic minds and exhibit little in the manner of emotion. Alfred Tarski was one of the greatest mathematical minds of the twentieth century and in many ways he was also a demanding scoundrel. He openly had extra-marital affairs, even to the point where he would bring the women home to meet his wife Maria. She had to have been one of the most tolerant and understanding of souls. When Maria finally left him, it had as much to do with his domestic demands as to his sexual (mis)adventures.
Not only was Tarski fortunate in his choice of mate, he was also very lucky to have lived when he did. In the modern academic world, his constant sexual advances to his female students would have gotten him fired very quickly, which brings up another irony. In the middle of the twentieth century, the expression of homosexuality was grounds for termination and ridicule, the authors are very clear about the activities of some of the gay friends of Tarski. One was even robbed once and then murdered later as a consequence of being gay. Yet, Tarski was free to seduce females with impunity, as he made no secret of his actions. At the start of the twenty-first century, expressing homosexuality is accepted and any sexual activity between a professor and student is grounds for termination.
The authors have used an effective structure in creating this book. The passages containing the heavy mathematics have chapter headings called interludes and the biographical sections are given specific titles. This allows the reader with little experience in logic to avoid the heavy mental lifting.
Alfred Tarski was a genius and very lucky in many ways, most specifically in his choice of wife. He also lived at a time when sex with your students was at least a tolerated perk of being a professor. Arrogant, cranky, opinionated and adored, he cut a swath through the mathematical community that will keep him remembered as long as mathematics is practiced and studied. A blunt and accurate biography, this book depicts Tarski as thoroughly Polish, brilliant, an egomaniac, a lifelong drug user, tolerant of "alternative" lifestyles and as both a positive and negative role model. It is the most entertaining biography of a mathematician that I have ever read.

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.