Heinrich Behmann (10 January 1891, in

Bremen Bremen ( Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (german: Stadtgemeinde Bremen, ), is the capital of the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (''Freie Hansestadt Bremen''), a two-city-state cons ...

-Aumund – 3 February 1970, in Bremen-Aumund) was a German

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 ...

. He performed research in the field of

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 concern ...

and

predicate logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...

. Behmann studied mathematics in

Tübingen Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in three ...

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

and

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

. During

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

, he was wounded and received the Iron Cross 2nd Class.

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many ...

supervised the preparation of his doctoral thesis, ''Die Antinomie der transfiniten Zahl und ihre Auflösung durch die Theorie von Russell und Whitehead''. In 1922 Behmann proved that the

monadic predicate calculus In logic, the monadic predicate calculus (also called monadic first-order logic) is the fragment of first-order logic in which all relation symbols in the signature are monadic (that is, they take only one argument), and there are no function symbo ...

is decidable. In 1938 he obtained a professorial chair in mathematics at

Halle (Saale) Halle (Saale), or simply Halle (; from the 15th to the 17th century: ''Hall in Sachsen''; until the beginning of the 20th century: ''Halle an der Saale'' ; from 1965 to 1995: ''Halle/Saale'') is the largest city of the German state of Saxony-An ...

. In 1945 he was dismissed for having been a member of the

NSDAP The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...

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Biography
(in German) * * 1891 births 1970 deaths 20th-century German mathematicians Scientists from Bremen Recipients of the Iron Cross (1914), 2nd class German logicians German philosophers University of Tübingen alumni Leipzig University alumni University of Göttingen alumni Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg faculty Nazi Party members {{Germany-mathematician-stub