Gerhard Gentzen

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Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen (November 24, 1909 – August 4, 1945) was a German mathematician and logician.

Gentzen was born in Greifswald, Germany. He was one of Hermann Weyl's students at the University of Göttingen from 1929 to 1933. Gentzen's main work was on the foundations of mathematics, in proof theory, specifically natural deduction and the sequent calculus. His cut-elimination theorem is the cornerstone of proof-theoretic semantics, and some philosophical remarks in his "Investigations into Logical Deduction", together with Ludwig Wittgenstein's aphorism that "meaning is use", constitute the starting point for inferential role semantics. He proved the consistency of the Peano axioms in 1936.

Gentzen was a member of the NSDAP and the SA. Between 1934 and 1943 he was assistant of David Hilbert in Göttingen. Since 1943 he was teacher (Dozent) at the University of Prague. After war he starved to death in Prague, after being arrested like all other Germans in Prague on May 7, 1945.^[1]

1 See also
2 Notes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

^ Menzler-Trott p 273 ff

[edit] References

Eckart Menzler-Trott. Gentzens Problem: Mathematische Logik im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Birkhäuser Verlag, 2001. ISBN 3-7643-6574-9. An English translation, Logic's Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen, by Edward Griffor and Craig Smorynski will appear in December 2007, published by the American and the London Mathematical Societies.