Here are some biographies of logicians that I wrote for my philosophy course. They are mostly paraphrased from Wikipedia:
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher who lived during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Viewed by many as one of the founders of modern mathematical logic and analytical philosophy, he is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was educated at the Universities of Jena and Göttingen where he studied math, physics and philosophy; eventually obtaining his doctorate. His foray into logic began in 1879 with the publishing of his book ‘Begriffsschrift’, which broke new ground in the fields of functions and variables. His goal became to show how mathematics grew out of logic; and to do this he had to take logic to a level it had not yet achieved. He is credited with inventing quantified variables and axiomatic predicate logic. He worked on ways of stating concepts in formal logic such as ‘some and ‘all’ (something Aristotle’s logic lacked); in fact, without his contributions to logic the phrases “every boy loves some girl” and “some girl is loved by every boy” would be symbolically ambiguous. He worked to isolate all ‘intuitive’ thought processes in math and logic, and reduce them to axioms that could be formally stated. As is usually the case with great minds, Frege’s works were not widely recognized or accepted in his day. It is thought that this is due to his revolutionary theories of logic, combined with an unusual notation which had no predecessor and has since not been emulated.
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American mathematician and philosopher who lived during the early-to-late 20th century. Claimed to be one of the most significant logicians of all time, his work had an immense impact on philosophical thinking in the 20th century – a time when logic and set theory were playing a large role in the understanding of mathematics. Gödel is perhaps best known for his theories on completeness. Not only was he able to show the completeness of first-order logic, but his famous incompleteness theorem shows that any more complicated system of logic (second-order or above) is necessarily incomplete. Gödel was a well-known friend of Albert Einstein; they often went on walks together, and both belonged to the Institute for Advanced Study. It was Einstein who helped coach Gödel for his US citizenship exam. During his citizenship exam, Gödel made a point of trying to explain to the judge how a loophole in the US constitution could allow for a dictatorship to be legally installed in the US. The judge was less than impressed with this idea, and did not allow him to finish his line of reasoning. Despite this, Gödel still managed to obtain his US citizenship. Near the end of his life, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned; and as a result had his wife – Adele – test his food for him. When Adele was hospitalized and no longer able to test his food, he refused to eat, resulting in a slow death by starvation. He died on January 14, 1978 weighing a total of 65lbs.
Willard Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th century American analytic philosopher and logician. Quine was affiliated with Harvard University for over 70 years, first as a student and then later as a professor, filling the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 – 1978. A well-known analytic philosopher, his most famous paper entitled “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, and sparked one of the largest controversies in analytic philosophy. Quine was also an accomplished logician, having written three undergraduate textbooks on the subject. He confined his definition of logic to first-order logic, famously referring to higher order logics as “set theory in disguise”; nor was he a big fan of modal logic. He was hopeful that eventually formal logic would have applications outside of the fields of mathematics and philosophy. To this end, he wrote several papers on Boolean algebra as employed in electrical engineering. Over time and as logic continued to progress and develop, much of Quine’s work in the field of logic became dated. Quine also made significant contributions to the field of set theory, which he maintained was distinct from logic. Over the course of his career he proposed no fewer than three distinct variants of axiomatic set theory. The over-arching theme of his work was to minimize the number of posits used in formal logic, preferring to simplify whenever possible. He was also related to the American guitarist Robert Quine, who was rated the 80th greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine.
