Raymond Smullyan: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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Born in [[Far Rockaway, Queens|Far Rockaway]], [[New York]], his first career (like [[Persi Diaconis]] a generation later) was stage magic. He then obtained a BSc from Chicago in 1955 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1959. He is one of many outstanding logicians to have studied under [[Alonzo Church]].

While a Ph.D. student, Smullyan published a paper in the 1957 ''Journal of Symbolic Logic'' showing that Gödelian incompleteness held for formal systems a good deal more elementary than that of Gödel's 1931 landmark paper. The contemporary understanding of [[Gödel's incompleteness theorem|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 indefinability theorem|Tarski's theorem]], which is much easier to prove and equally disturbing philosophically. The culmination of Smullyan's lifelong reflection on the classic limitative theorems of mathematical logic is his quite readable:

Smullyan, R M (2001) "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems " in Goble, Lou, ed., ''The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic''. Blackwell (ISBN 0-63120693-0).