Jan Lukasiewicz
Encyclopedia
Jan Łukasiewicz (ˈjan wukaˈɕɛvʲitʂ) (21 December 1878 – 13 February 1956) was a Polish
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 logician and philosopher born in Lwów (Lemberg in German), Galicia, Austria–Hungary (now Lviv
Lviv
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...

, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

). His work centred on analytical philosophy and mathematical logic
Mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...

. He thought innovatively about traditional propositional logic, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle
Law of excluded middle
In logic, the law of excluded middle is the third of the so-called three classic laws of thought. It states that for any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is....

.

Life

He grew up in Lwów and was the only child of Paweł Łukasiewicz, a captain in the Austrian army, and Leopoldina (née Holtzer), the daughter of an Austrian civil servant. His family was Roman Catholic.

He finished his gymnasium studies in philology and in 1897 went on to Lwów University
Lviv University
The Lviv University or officially the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv is the oldest continuously operating university in Ukraine...

 (University of Lemberg) where he studied philosophy and mathematics. In philosophy he was a pupil of Kazimierz Twardowski
Kazimierz Twardowski
Kazimierz Jerzy Skrzypna-Twardowski was a Polish philosopher and logician.-Life:Twardowski's family belonged to the Ogończyk coat-of-arms.Twardowski studied philosophy in Vienna with Franz Brentano and Robert Zimmermann...

.

In 1902, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree under the patronage of emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria
Franz Joseph I of Austria
Franz Joseph I or Francis Joseph I was Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, King of Croatia, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Galicia and Lodomeria and Grand Duke of Cracow from 1848 until his death in 1916.In the December of 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria abdicated the throne as part of...

 who gave him a special doctor ring with diamonds.

He spent three years as a private teacher, and in 1905 he received a scholarship to complete his philosophical studies at the University of Berlin
Humboldt University of Berlin
The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities...

 and the University of Louvain in Belgium.

Łukasiewicz continued studying for his habilitation
Habilitation
Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in several European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate, such as a PhD, habilitation requires the candidate to write a professorial thesis based on independent...

 qualification and in 1906 submitted his thesis to the University of Lwów. In 1906 he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Lwów where he was eventually appointed Extraordinary Professor by Emperor Franz Joseph I. He taught there until the First World War
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

.

In 1915 he was invited to lecture as a full professor at the University of Warsaw
University of Warsaw
The University of Warsaw is the largest university in Poland and one of the most prestigious, ranked as best Polish university in 2010 and 2011...

 which had re-opened after being closed down by the Tsarist government
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

 in the 19th century.

In 1919 Łukasiewicz left the university to serve as Polish Minister of Religious Denominations and Public Education in the Paderewski
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Ignacy Jan Paderewski GBE was a Polish pianist, composer, diplomat, politician, and the second Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland.-Biography:...

 government until 1920.

In 1928 he married Regina Barwińska.

He remained a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1920 until 1939 when the family house was destroyed by German bombs and the university was closed under German occupation. He had been a rector of the university twice. In this period Lukasiewicz and Stanisław Leśniewski founded the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic
Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic
The Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic was headed by Kazimierz Twardowski, who had been a student of Franz Brentano and is regarded as the "father of Polish logic."-History:...

 which was later made internationally famous by Alfred Tarski
Alfred Tarski
Alfred Tarski was a Polish logician and mathematician. Educated at the University of Warsaw and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic and the Warsaw School of Mathematics and philosophy, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, and taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of...

 who had been Leśniewski's student.

At the beginning of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 he worked at the Warsaw Underground University as part of the secret system of education in Poland during World War II
Education in Poland during World War II
This article covers the topic of underground education in Poland during World War II. Secret learning prepared new cadres for the post-war reconstruction of Poland and countered the German and Soviet threat to exterminate the Polish culture....

.

He and his wife wanted to move to Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 but couldn't get permission from the German authorities. Instead, in the summer of 1944, they left Poland with the help of Heinrich Scholz and spent the last few months of the war in Münster
Münster
Münster is an independent city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also capital of the local government region Münsterland...

, Germany hoping to somehow go on further, perhaps to Switzerland.

Following the war, he emigrated to Ireland and worked at the University College Dublin
University College Dublin
University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...

 (UCD) until his death.

Work

A number of axiomatizations of classical
Classical logic
Classical logic identifies a class of formal logics that have been most intensively studied and most widely used. The class is sometimes called standard logic as well...

 propositional logic are due to Łukasiewicz. A particularly elegant axiomatization features a mere three axioms and is still invoked down to the present day. He was a pioneer investigator of multi-valued logic
Multi-valued logic
In logic, a many-valued logic is a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values. Traditionally, in Aristotle's logical calculus, there were only two possible values for any proposition...

s; his three-valued propositional calculus, introduced in 1917, was the first explicitly axiomatized non-classical
Classical logic
Classical logic identifies a class of formal logics that have been most intensively studied and most widely used. The class is sometimes called standard logic as well...

 logical calculus
Propositional calculus
In mathematical logic, a propositional calculus or logic is a formal system in which formulas of a formal language may be interpreted as representing propositions. A system of inference rules and axioms allows certain formulas to be derived, called theorems; which may be interpreted as true...

. He wrote on the philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...

, and his approach to the making of scientific theories was similar to the thinking of Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...

.

Łukasiewicz invented the Polish notation
Polish notation
Polish notation, also known as prefix notation, is a form of notation for logic, arithmetic, and algebra. Its distinguishing feature is that it places operators to the left of their operands. If the arity of the operators is fixed, the result is a syntax lacking parentheses or other brackets that...

 (named after his nationality) for the logical connectives around 1920. There is a quotation from his paper, Remarks on Nicod's Axiom and on "Generalizing Deduction", page 180.
"I came upon the idea of a parenthesis-free notation in 1924. I used that notation for the first time in my article Łukasiewicz(1), p. 610, footnote."
The reference cited by Łukasiewicz above is apparently a lithographed report in Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...

. The referring paper by Łukasiewicz Remarks on Nicod's Axiom and on "Generalizing Deduction", originally published in Polish in 1931, was later reviewed by H. A. Pogorzelski in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1965.

In Łukasiewicz 1951 book, Aristotle's Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic, he mentions that the principle of his notation was to write the functors before the arguments to avoid brackets and that he had employed his notation in his logical papers since 1929. He then goes on to cite, as an example, a 1930 paper he wrote with Alfred Tarski
Alfred Tarski
Alfred Tarski was a Polish logician and mathematician. Educated at the University of Warsaw and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic and the Warsaw School of Mathematics and philosophy, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, and taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of...

 on the sentential calculus
Propositional calculus
In mathematical logic, a propositional calculus or logic is a formal system in which formulas of a formal language may be interpreted as representing propositions. A system of inference rules and axioms allows certain formulas to be derived, called theorems; which may be interpreted as true...

.

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
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

, Bauer
Friedrich L. Bauer
Friedrich Ludwig Bauer is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at Technical University of Munich.-Life:...

 and Hamblin
Charles Leonard Hamblin
Charles Leonard Hamblin was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the Technical University of New South Wales in Sydney....

, and first implemented in 1957. In 1960, Łukasiewicz notation concepts and stacks were used as the basis of the Burroughs B5000 computer designed by Robert S. Barton and his team at Burroughs Corporation in Pasadena, California
Pasadena, California
Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...

. The concepts also led to the design of the English Electric multi-programmed KDF9
English Electric KDF9
KDF9 was an early British computer designed and built by English Electric, later English Electric Leo Marconi, EELM, later still incorporated into ICL. It first came into service in 1964 and was still in use in 1980 in at least one installation...

 computer system of 1963, which had two such hardware register stacks. A similar concept underlies the reverse Polish notation
Reverse Polish notation
Reverse Polish notation is a mathematical notation wherein every operator follows all of its operands, in contrast to Polish notation, which puts the operator in the prefix position. It is also known as Postfix notation and is parenthesis-free as long as operator arities are fixed...

 (RPN, a postfix notation) of the Friden
Friden, Inc.
Friden Calculating Machine Company was an American manufacturer of typewriters and electronic calculators. It was founded by Carl Friden in San Leandro, California in 1934. Friden electromechanical calculators were robust and popular....

 EC-130 calculator and its successors, many Hewlett Packard calculators, the Forth programming language, or the PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

 page description language.

Recognition

In 2008 the Polish Information Processing Society established the Jan Łukasiewicz Award, to be presented to the most innovative Polish IT companies.

From 1999-2004, the Department of Computer Science building at UCD was called the Łukasiewicz Building, until all campus buildings were re-named after the disciplines they housed.

Chronology

  • 1878 born
  • 1890–1902 studies with Kazimierz Twardowski
    Kazimierz Twardowski
    Kazimierz Jerzy Skrzypna-Twardowski was a Polish philosopher and logician.-Life:Twardowski's family belonged to the Ogończyk coat-of-arms.Twardowski studied philosophy in Vienna with Franz Brentano and Robert Zimmermann...

     in Lemberg (Lwów, L'viv)
  • 1902 doctorate (mathematics and philosophy), University of Lemberg with the highest distinction possible
  • 1906 habilitation
    Habilitation
    Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in several European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate, such as a PhD, habilitation requires the candidate to write a professorial thesis based on independent...

     thesis completed, University of Lemberg
  • 1906 becomes a lecturer
  • 1910 essays on the principle of non-contradiction and the excluded middle
  • 1911 extraordinary professor at Lemberg
  • 1915 invited to the newly reopened University of Warsaw
  • 1916 new Kingdom of Poland
    Poland
    Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

     declared
  • 1917 develops three-valued propositional calculus
  • 1919 Polish Minister of Education
  • 1920–1939 professor at Warsaw University founds with Stanisław Leśniewski the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic
    Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic
    The Lwów–Warsaw School of Logic was headed by Kazimierz Twardowski, who had been a student of Franz Brentano and is regarded as the "father of Polish logic."-History:...

     (see also Alfred Tarski
    Alfred Tarski
    Alfred Tarski was a Polish logician and mathematician. Educated at the University of Warsaw and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic and the Warsaw School of Mathematics and philosophy, he emigrated to the USA in 1939, and taught and carried out research in mathematics at the University of...

    , Stefan Banach
    Stefan Banach
    Stefan Banach was a Polish mathematician who worked in interwar Poland and in Soviet Ukraine. He is generally considered to have been one of the 20th century's most important and influential mathematicians....

    , Hugo Steinhaus
    Hugo Steinhaus
    Władysław Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the University of Lwów, where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics...

    , Zygmunt Janiszewski
    Zygmunt Janiszewski
    Zygmunt Janiszewski was a Polish mathematician.-Life:His mother was Julia Szulc-Chojnicka. His father, Czeslaw Janiszewski, was a graduate of the University of Warsaw and was an important person in finance, being the director of the Société du Crédit Municipal in Warsaw.Janiszewski taught at the...

    , Stefan Mazurkiewicz
    Stefan Mazurkiewicz
    Stefan Mazurkiewicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. He was a student of Wacław Sierpiński and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning...

    )
  • 1928 marries Regina Barwińska
  • 1944 flees to Germany and settles in Hembsen, where he was brought for his own safety.
  • 1946 exile in Belgium
    Belgium
    Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

  • 1946 offered a chair by the Royal Irish Academy
    Royal Irish Academy
    The Royal Irish Academy , based in Dublin, is an all-Ireland, independent, academic body that promotes study and excellence in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is one of Ireland's premier learned societies and cultural institutions and currently has around 420 Members, elected in...

    , held at University College Dublin
    University College Dublin
    University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...

  • 1953 writes autobiography
  • 1956 dies in Dublin

Papers

  • 1903 "On Induction as Inversion of Deduction"
  • 1906 "Analysis and Construction of the Concept of Cause"
  • 1910 "On Aristotle's Principle of Contradiction"
  • 1913 "On the Reversibility of the Relation of Ground and Consequence"
  • 1920 "On Three-valued Logic"
  • 1921 "Two-valued Logic"
  • 1922 "A Numerical Interpretation of the Theory of Propositions"
  • 1928 "Concerning the Method in Philosophy"
  • 1929 "Elements of Mathematical Logic"
  • 1929 "On Importance and Requirements of Mathematical Logic"
  • 1930 "Philosophical Remarks on Many-Valued Systems of Propositional Logic"
  • 1930 "Investigations into the Sentential Calculus" ["Untersuchungen über den Aussagenkalkül"], with Alfred Tarski
  • 1931 "Comments on Nicod's Axiom and the 'Generalizing Deduction'"
  • 1934 "On Science"
  • 1934 "Importance of Logical Analysis for Knowledge"
  • 1934 "Outlines of the History of the Propositional Logic"
  • 1936 "Logistic and Philosophy"
  • 1937 "In Defense of the Logistic"
  • 1938 "On Descartes's Philosophy"
  • 1943 "The Shortest Axiom of the Implicational Calculus of Propositions"
  • 1951 "On Variable Functors of Propositional Arguments"
  • 1952 "On the Intuitionistic Theory of Deduction"
  • 1953 "A System of Modal Logic"
  • 1954 "On a Controversial Problem of Aristotle's Modal Syllogistic"

See also

  • Łukasiewicz logic
  • History of philosophy in Poland
  • Stanisław Leśniewski
  • List of Poles
  • 27114 Lukasiewicz
    27114 Lukasiewicz
    27114 Lukasiewicz is an outer main-belt asteroid discovered on November 19, 1998, by P. G. Comba at Prescott Observatory. The asteroid is named after Jan Łukasiewicz.- External links :*...


Further reading

  • Borkowski, L.; Słupecki, J., "The logical works of J. Łukasiewicz", Studia Logica 8 (1958), 7–56.
  • Kotarbiński, T., "Jan Łukasiewicz's works on the history of logic", Studia Logica 8 (1958), 57–62.
  • Kwiatkowski, T., "Jan Łukasiewicz – A historian of logic", Organon 16–17 (1980–1981), 169–188.
  • Marshall, D., "Łukasiewicz, Leibniz and the arithmetization of the syllogism", Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 18 (2) (1977), 235–242.
  • Woleński, Jan, "Jan Łukasiewicz on the Liar Paradox, Logical Consequence, Truth and Induction", Modern Logic 4 (1994), 394–400.

External links

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