Early Work
Post was born in Augustów, Russian Empire into a Polish-Jewish family that immigrated to America when he was a child. His parents were Arnold and Pearl Post.
He attended the Townsend Harris High School and continued on to graduate from City College of New York in 1917 with a B.S. in Mathematics.
After completing his Ph.D. in mathematics at Columbia University, he did a post-doctorate at Princeton University. While at Princeton, he came very close to discovering the incompleteness of Principia Mathematica, which Kurt Gödel proved in 1931. Post then became a high school mathematics teacher in New York City.
In his doctoral thesis, Post proved, among other things, that the propositional calculus of Principia Mathematica was complete: all tautologies are theorems, given the Principia axioms and the rules of substitution and modus ponens. Post also devised truth tables independently of Wittgenstein and C.S. Peirce and put them to good mathematical use. Jean Van Heijenoort's well-known source book on mathematical logic (1966) reprinted Post's classic article setting out these results.
In 1936, he was appointed to the mathematics department at the City College of New York. He died in 1954 of a heart attack following electroshock treatment for depression; he was 57.
Read more about this topic: Emil Leon Post
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