The Logician
Dreben was a rare combination of expert logician, and careful historian of ideas and interpreter of historical texts. In the 1950s, he found a copy of Jacques Herbrand's Ph.D. thesis, submitted to the University of Paris in 1929 and thought lost. (Herbrand died in 1931 before either marrying or starting his career.) Dreben found a number of significant errors in the thesis, as well as evidence of haste and carelessness in its preparation. In particular, in Herbrand's proof a crucial lemma was fatally flawed, but Dreben found another way of proving the essential conclusions of the thesis. Dreben's introduction to the translation of Herbrand's thesis in van Heijenoort (1967) includes a concise description of his work on Herbrand's writings.
In the 1970s, Dreben and Warren Goldfarb wrote a book on the decision problem.
Read more about this topic: Burton Dreben
Famous quotes containing the word logician:
“From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”
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