Рэймонд Смаллиан: Математик, логик және көп қырлы тұлға

American mathematician and logician

Raymond Merrill Smullyan ('/s//m//ʌ//l//i//ə//n/; May 25, 1919 – February 6, 2017) was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, his first career was stage magic. He earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. He is one of many logicians to have studied with Alonzo Church.

He was born on May 25, 1919, in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. His father was Isidore Smullyan, a Russian born businessman who emigrated to Belgium when young and graduated from the University of Antwerp, his native language being French. His mother was Rosina Smullyan (née Freeman), a painter and actress born and raised in London. Both parents were musical, his father playing the violin and his mother playing the piano. He was the youngest of three children. His eldest brother, Emile Benoit Smullyan, later became an economist under the name of Emile Benoit. His sister was Gladys Smullyan, later Gladys Gwynn. His cousin was the philosopher Arthur Francis Smullyan (1912–1998). In Far Rockaway he was a grade school classmate of Richard Feynman. Smullyan showed musical talent from a young age, playing both violin and piano. He studied with pianist Grace Hofheimer in New York. He had perfect pitch. In 1931 he won a gold medal in the piano competition of the New York Music Week Association when he was aged 12 (the previous year he had won the silver medal). He later transferred to the University of Chicago and majored in mathematics. After a break in which he worked as a magician in New York and met his first wife, he returned to the University of Chicago, where he also worked as a magician at night and taught piano on the faculty at Roosevelt University. While at Chicago he took three courses with the philosopher Rudolf Carnap, for which he wrote three term papers. Carnap recommended that he send the first term paper to Willard Van Orman Quine, which he did. Quine replied that he should tinker with his idea about what makes quantification theory tick. Of the other two term papers, one, entitled "Languages in which Self Reference is Possible" (which Carnap showed to Kurt Gödel), was later published in 1957. The other was later published in his 1961 book Theory of Formal Systems. While still a student at the University of Chicago, on the basis of a recommendation from Carnap, he was hired by John G. Kemeny, the chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth College. He taught at Dartmouth for two years. During that time he separated from his first wife, from whom he later divorced. He also used to visit his friends Gloria and Marvin Minsky (Gloria Minsky was his cousin) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1959. He completed his doctoral dissertation, titled "Theory of formal systems", under the supervision of Alonzo Church, which was published in 1961. While a graduate student at Princeton he met his second wife, Blanche, a pianist and teacher, born in Belgium, to whom he was married for 48 years until she died in 2006. While a PhD student, his term paper for Carnap, "Languages in which Self Reference is Possible", was published in 1957 in the Journal of Symbolic Logic, showing that Gödelian incompleteness held for formal systems considerably more elementary than that of Kurt Gödel's 1931 landmark paper. The contemporary understanding of Gödel's theorem dates from this paper. Smullyan later made a compelling case that much of the fascination with Gödel's theorem should be directed at Tarski's theorem, which is much easier to prove and equally disturbing philosophically. After getting his PhD from Princeton, he taught at Princeton for two years. He subsequently taught at New York University, at the State University of New York at New Paltz, at Smith College, and at the Belfer Graduate School of Science at Yeshiva University, before becoming professor of mathematics and computer science at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he taught undergraduate students from 1968 to 1984. He was also a professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center from 1976 to 1984, where he taught graduate students. He was subsequently a professor of philosophy at Indiana University, where he taught both undergraduate and graduate students. He was also an amateur astronomer, using a six inch reflecting telescope for which he ground the mirror.

Smullyan wrote several books about Taoist philosophy, a philosophy he believed neatly solved most or all traditional philosophical problems as well as integrating mathematics, logic, and philosophy into a cohesive whole. One of Smullyan's discussions of Taoist philosophy centers on the question of free will in an imagined conversation between a mortal human and God.

Is God a Taoist? by Raymond Smullyan, 1977. Planet Without Laughter by Raymond Smullyan, 1980. An Epistemological Nightmare by Raymond Smullyan, 1982.