Moses Schönfinkel

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Moses Schönfinkel, also known as Moisei Isai'evich Sheinfinkel' Шейнфинкель (September 4, 1889 Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) – 1942, Moscow) was a Jewish/Soviet logician and mathematician.

He attended the Novorossiysk University of Odessa, where he studied mathematics with Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii (1859-1929), who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics. From 1914 to 1924, Schönfinkel worked at the University of Göttingen with David Hilbert's group.

In a talk given at Goettingen in 1920, Schönfinkel invented combinatory logic, which was further developed by Haskell Curry (who studied under Hilbert in the late 1920s). Heinrich Behmann revised the text of this talk and published it in 1924. This article also introduced what is now called currying, named after Haskell Curry. Schönfinkel wrote nothing else about combinatory logic; its entire development after 1924 is due to Curry and others.

Schönfinkel published a 1929 article with Paul Bernays on the decision problem ("Entscheidungsproblem") for mathematical logic.

Schönfinkel returned to the USSR prior to the outbreak of World War II, and died in Moscow in 1942. The precise date of his death is unknown.

[edit] References

• 1924. "Über die Bausteine der mathematischen Logik", Mathematische Annalen 92, pp. 305-316. Translated by Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg as "On the building blocks of mathematical logic" in Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 355-66.
• 1929. (with Paul Bernays) "Zum Entscheidungsproblem der mathematischen Logik," Mathematische Annalen 99: 342-72.