Adolf Lindenbaum (12 June 1904 – August 1941) was a

Polish-Jewish The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the lon ...

logician Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...

and

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

best known for

Lindenbaum's lemma In mathematical logic, Lindenbaum's lemma, named after Adolf Lindenbaum, states that any consistent theory of predicate logic can be extended to a complete consistent theory. The lemma is a special case of the ultrafilter lemma for Boolean algebras, ...

and

Lindenbaum–Tarski algebra In mathematical logic, the Lindenbaum–Tarski algebra (or Lindenbaum algebra) of a logical theory ''T'' consists of the equivalence classes of sentences of the theory (i.e., the quotient, under the equivalence relation ~ defined such that ''p'' ...

s. He was born and brought up in

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

. He earned a Ph.D. in 1928 under

Wacław Sierpiński Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński (; 14 March 1882 – 21 October 1969) was a Polish mathematician. He was known for contributions to set theory (research on the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis), number theory, theory of functions, and to ...

and

habilitated Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...

at the

University of Warsaw The University of Warsaw ( pl, Uniwersytet Warszawski, la, Universitas Varsoviensis) is a public university in Warsaw, Poland. Established in 1816, it is the largest institution of higher learning in the country offering 37 different fields of ...

in 1934. He published works on

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of logic, formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of for ...

set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...

cardinal Cardinal or The Cardinal may refer to: Animals * Cardinal (bird) or Cardinalidae, a family of North and South American birds **''Cardinalis'', genus of cardinal in the family Cardinalidae **''Cardinalis cardinalis'', or northern cardinal, the ...

and

ordinal arithmetic In the mathematical field of set theory, ordinal arithmetic describes the three usual operations on ordinal numbers: addition, multiplication, and exponentiation. Each can be defined in essentially two different ways: either by constructing an expl ...

, the

axiom of choice In mathematics, the axiom of choice, or AC, is an axiom of set theory equivalent to the statement that ''a Cartesian product of a collection of non-empty sets is non-empty''. Informally put, the axiom of choice says that given any collectio ...

, the

continuum hypothesis In mathematics, the continuum hypothesis (abbreviated CH) is a hypothesis about the possible sizes of infinite sets. It states that or equivalently, that In Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC), this is equivalent to ...

, theory of functions,

measure theory In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures ( length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as mass and probability of events. These seemingly distinct concepts have many simil ...

point-set topology In mathematics, general topology is the branch of topology that deals with the basic set-theoretic definitions and constructions used in topology. It is the foundation of most other branches of topology, including differential topology, geomet ...

geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is c ...

and

real analysis In mathematics, the branch of real analysis studies the behavior of real numbers, sequences and series of real numbers, and real functions. Some particular properties of real-valued sequences and functions that real analysis studies include converg ...

. He served as an

assistant professor Assistant Professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States and Canada. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doctoral degree and general ...

at the

from 1935 until the outbreak of war in September 1939. He was

Alfred Tarski Alfred Tarski (, born Alfred Teitelbaum;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews ''School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews''. January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was a Polish-American logician a ...

's closest collaborator of the inter-war period. Around the end of October or beginning of November 1935 he married Janina Hosiasson, a fellow logician of the Lwow–Warsaw school. He and his wife were adherents of

logical empiricism Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion o ...

, participated in and contributed to the international

unity of science The unity of science is a thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole. Overview The unity of science thesis was proposed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in "General System Theory: A New Approach to Unity of Scie ...

movement, and were members of the original

Vienna Circle The Vienna Circle (german: Wiener Kreis) of Logical Empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, cha ...

. Sometime before the middle of August 1941 he and his sister Stefanja were shot to death in

Naujoji Vilnia Naujoji Vilnia is an eldership in eastern Vilnius, Lithuania situated along the banks of the Vilnia River. According to the 2011 census, the municipality had a population of 31,933. This figure grew to 36,507 in 2021, when the newest census wa ...

(Nowa Wilejka), 7 km east of

Vilnius Vilnius ( , ; see also other names) is the capital and largest city of Lithuania, with a population of 592,389 (according to the state register) or 625,107 (according to the municipality of Vilnius). The population of Vilnius's functional urb ...

, by the occupying German forces or Lithuanian collaborators.Purdy, Robert; Zygmunt, Jan (2018-06-29). "Adolf Lindenbaum, Metric Spaces and Decompositions". ''The Lvov–Warsaw School. Past and Present'', ed. by Ángel Garrido and

Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska (born 1940) is a Polish logician whose research topics have included rough sets and inference rules for rejecting certain propositions as invalid. Education and career Wybraniec-Skardowska was born in Jastrzębie-Z ...

, Birkhäuser: Basel 2018
p. 518
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-65430-0_36. ISSN 2297-0282.

References

External links

Adolf Lindenbaum
entry at

The Internet Encyclopedia Of Philosophy The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''IEP'') is a scholarly online encyclopedia, dealing with philosophy, philosophical topics, and philosophers. The IEP combines open access publication with peer reviewed publication of original pape ...

Jan Woleński Jan Hertrich-Woleński (also known as Jan Woleński; born 21 September 1940) is a Polish philosopher specializing in the history of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his academic career at the J ...

(includes a portrait) * An Open Acces
article
on Lindenbaum's life and works in ''Logica Universalis'', Volume 8, Issue 3–4 (December 2014), pp 285–320 [note: the authors revisited the life of Adolf Lindenbaum in light of new research findings in a later non Open Access pape
here

contains fragments of his memoirs mentioning the murder of Lindenbaum * 1904 births 1941 deaths 20th-century Polish philosophers 20th-century Polish mathematicians Polish logicians Polish Jews who died in the Holocaust Polish set theorists Polish people executed by Nazi Germany Scientists from Warsaw Victims of the Ponary massacre Executed people from Masovian Voivodeship {{Poland-mathematician-stub