Talk:Alfred Tarski

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Hi,

I just added (Nov. 02/03) a fair bit of text to this article. I've never contributed to Wikipedia before, so I defintely didn't adhere to standards of formatting, and my have gone beyond the level of detail being aimed at.

I'd be very happy is someone wanted to clean up the formatting on my contribution. (And, as the history of this page will show, sloppy spelling errors, too!)

Best to all,

Brian van den Broek

After a quick skim, the level of detail looks fine. It is more detailed than many wikipedia articles, but we need more detailed articles. As you say, it does need some editorial work, which I'll try to get to soon. Also, the article could use some conventional biographical info. (education, academic career, etc.). Loren Rosen

---

O just added some bio details and a reference to Tarski 2002. In both cases, I need characters I don't know how to produce. "Lukasiewicz" should have a forward slasj (approx. "/") trhough the "L", "Lesniewski" should have an accent aigu (sp?) on the first "s", "Kotarbinski" an accent aigu on the "n" as should "Stroinska". Anybody know how to get these? If you change it yourself, would you mind putting an indication of how here or on my user page, so that I will know for next time? Thanks, vanden 01:09, 5 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Try Ł š ň which gives Ł š ň. See Table of Unicode characters, 128 to 999. But see also Unicode and HTML. These may not render properly on older browsers.

Contents 1 biography 2 On the use and over-use of sources 3 Some suggestions 4 Year of birth?

[edit] biography

There's a new biography of Tarski out and it looks pretty interesting. Maybe someone who's read it can update the wp article, or at least add a reference. I may pick it up soon. After the success of A Beautiful Mind maybe we're in for a spate of lurid math biographies.

The biography is Feferman and Feferman 2004, already cited in the references and now mentioned in the article. I have a copy now and will try to add some biographical material to the wp article if nobody else does it first.

I too own a copy of F&F 2004. It reveals that Tarski indeed had a far more interesting life than John Nash. It is also lurid; Tarski was a classic case of the Richard Wagner syndrome: "I am a genius and geniuses are exempt from the usual moral rules." An unusual proportion of Tarski's Ph.D. students were women, but his respect for their ability to do math was seldom the sole explanation.202.36.179.65 23:38, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On the use and over-use of sources

• JA: Encyclopedia statements need to be sourced. For example, we all have our favorite writers, and Tarski is certainly one of mine, but an encyclopedia begins to sound rather silly when a large %-age of its biographical articles start out saying "X is considered the greatest Y of era Z". If one can quote a source that says that, fine, that takes us off the hook of originating opinions, otherwise it's best to leave it out. Jon Awbrey 17:30, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

• JA: On the other side of the ledger, copying or paraphasing large sections of a single published biography is a Big NO-NO, and it's incumbent on encyclopedia editors to use multiple sources and to attribute selected individual statements appropriately. Jon Awbrey 17:30, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Tu quoque.

[edit] Some suggestions

Much of the material in section (4)-(6) is a review of recent polemics in the philosophy literature, about which the jury is still out; hence Wikipedia is not the right place for such material. Moreover, it's not that well written. It should be replaced with a careful concise exposition of the content of Tarski's best known papers. Tarski's theory of truth, by the way, deserves its own entry.

Smullyan has convinced me that much of the hoopla attending the results of Godel (1931) should instead be accorded to Tarski's Indefinability Theorem (TIT). TIT is not tied to Peano arithmetic, and for that reason its philosophical value is more evident. Moreover, TIT is much easier to prove than Godel's results (although Smullyan has shown that these too are not as hard to prove as people think). Proving TIT requires a bare minimum of syntactic machinery, plus the trick called diagonalisation. I invite someone versed in metamathematics to add a paragraph to this entry fleshing out what I say here.

I've done what I could with Tarski the mathematician and logician, and invite others to do more. But anyone doing so had better have done graduate work in the area, and have a copy of Feferman and Feferman at her side! BTW, Tarski's students Steve Givant and Roger Maddux are good expositors of Tarskian mathematics.202.36.179.65 00:21, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

• JA: Re:

Along with Aristotle, Frege, and Kurt Godel, Tarski is one of the four greatest logicians of all time (Vaught 1986).

• JA: I think that a direct quotation and a page reference would be called for here. Also a mention of the following form: "R.L. Vaught, one of Tarski's students, wrote ..." Jon Awbrey 00:52, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Year of birth?

On some places year of birth is 1901, but on some places is 1902. What is true year? Date is January 14, but for year of birth I am not sure. Can anyone help about that? --Djordjes (talk) 08:12, 5 June 2006 (UTC)