The Tarski Lectures - UC Berkeley Department of Mathematics

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The Tarski Lectures

The Alfred Tarski Lectures are supported by an endowment fund established in memory of a man widely regarded as one of the four greatest logicians of all time. A superb teacher and influential scientific leader as well as a profound thinker, Alfred Tarski arrived in Berkeley in 1942 at the age of 41 and built up here what is often cited as the outstanding center for research in logic and the foundations of mathematics in the world.

The 2008 Tarski Lecture were given by Yiannnis N. Moschovakis, University of California, Los Angeles.

Alfred Tarski

Born in Warsaw in 1901, Tarski was educated in Polish schools and received his Ph.D. at the University of Warsaw in 1924. He served as a Docent and later as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Warsaw. He was visiting the U.S. when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Unable to return home, he remained in this country and in 1942 accepted a position as Lecturer at Berkeley. He became a full professor in 1946 and in 1958 founded the pioneering interdisciplinary Group in Logic and the Methodology Science. He retired in 1971 and died in October 1983 at the age of 82.

Of his numerous investigations, outlined in seven books and more than 300 other publications, Tarski was most proud of two: his design in 1930 of an algorithm to decide the truth or falsity of any sentence in the elementary theory of the field of real numbers and his path-breaking mathematical treatment in the early 1930's of the semantics of formal languages and the concept of truth.

Past Tarski Lecturers

1989 Dana Stewart Scott
1990 Willard Van Orman Quine
1991 Bjarni Jónsson & H. Jerome Keisler
1992 Donald Anthony Martin
1993 Alec James Wilkie
1994 Michael O. Rabin
1995 Hilary Putnam
1996 Ehud Hrushovski
1997 Menachem Magidor
1998 Angus John Macintyre
1999 Patrick Suppes
2000 Alexander A. Razborov
2001 Ronald Bjorn Jensen
2002 Boris Zilber
2003 Ralph Nelson McKenzie
2004 Alexander S. Kechris
2005 Zlil Sela
2006 Solomon Feferman
2007 Harvey M. Friedman
2008 Yiannis N. Moschovakis