Life
Born in Far Rockaway, New York, he showed musical talent, winning a gold medal in a piano competition when he was aged 12. The following year, his family moved to Manhattan and he attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in The Bronx as this school offered courses suited to his musical talents, but he left to study on his own as the school did not offer similar courses in mathematics.
He attended several colleges, studying mathematics and music.
While a Ph.D. student, Smullyan published a paper in the 1957 Journal of Symbolic Logic showing that Gödelian incompleteness held for formal systems considerably more elementary than that of 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. The culmination of Smullyan's lifelong reflection on the classic limitative theorems of mathematical logic is quite readable:
- Smullyan, R M (2001) "Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems" in Goble, Lou, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic. Blackwell (ISBN 0-631-20693-0).
Smullyan is the author of many books on recreational mathematics, recreational logic, etc. Most notably, one is titled What Is the Name of This Book?.
He was a professor of philosophy at City College in New York.
He is also an amateur astronomer, using a six inch reflecting telescope for which he ground the mirror.
Read more about this topic: Raymond Smullyan
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The more the development of late capitalism renders obsolete or at least suspect the real possibilities of self, self- fulfillment and actualization, the more they are emphasized as if they could spring to life through an act of will alone.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)
“[The sceptic] must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge any thing, that all human life must perish, were his principles to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease, and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Parenting is the one area of my life where I can feel incompetent, out of control and like a total failure all of the time.”
—Attorney Father. As quoted in Reviving Ophelia, by Mary Pipher, ch. 4 (1994)