Stanisław Leśniewski (nonfiction)
Stanisław Leśniewski (March 30, 1886 – May 13, 1939) was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician.
Leśniewski belonged to the first generation of the Lwów-Warsaw School of logic founded by Kazimierz Twardowski. Together with Alfred Tarski and Jan Łukasiewicz, he formed the troika, which made the University of Warsaw, during the Interbellum, perhaps the most important research center in the world for formal logic.
His main contribution was the construction of three nested formal systems, to which he gave the Greek-derived names of protothetic, ontology, and mereology. ("Calculus of names" is sometimes used instead of ontology, a term widely employed in metaphysics in a very different sense.)
His writings had limited impact because of their enigmatic style and highly idiosyncratic notation. Leśniewski was also a radical nominalist: he rejected axiomatic set theory at a time when that theory was in full flower. He pointed to Russell's paradox and the like in support of his rejection, and devised his three formal systems as a concrete alternative to set theory.
Even though Alfred Tarski was his sole doctoral pupil, Leśniewski nevertheless strongly influenced an entire generation of Polish logicians and mathematicians via his teaching at the University of Warsaw.
It is mainly thanks to the writings of his students (e.g., Srzednicki and Rickey 1984) that Leśniewski's thought is known.
In the News
Fiction cross-reference
Nonfiction cross-reference
- Mathematics (nonfiction)
- Denis Miéville (nonfiction) - Influenced
- Alfred Tarski (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
- Kazimierz Twardowski (nonfiction) - Doctoral advisor
External links:
- Stanisław Leśniewski @ Wikipedia