Pavel Tichý (; 18 February 1936,
Brno
Brno ( , ; ) is a Statutory city (Czech Republic), city in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. Located at the confluence of the Svitava (river), Svitava and Svratka (river), Svratka rivers, Brno has about 403,000 inhabitants, making ...
,
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
– 26 October 1994,
Dunedin
Dunedin ( ; ) is the second-most populous city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from ("fort of Edin"), the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of S ...
,
New Zealand
New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...
) was a
Czech logician,
philosopher
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
.
He worked in the field of
intensional logic and founded
transparent intensional logic, an original theory of the logical analysis of
natural language
A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...
s – the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means. He spent roughly 25 years working on it. His main work is a book ''The Foundations of Frege's Logic'', published by
Walter de Gruyter in 1988.
Biography
Tichý was born in Brno in 1936. His father was an insurance clerk. His family lived in
Zlín
Zlín (in 1949–1989 Gottwaldov; ; ) is a city in the Czech Republic. It has about 75,000 inhabitants. It is the seat of the Zlín Region and it lies on the Dřevnice River. It is known as an industrial centre. The development of the modern city ...
until 1948 when they moved to
Vsetín. At school he was already a brilliant student. He also liked playing music of
Jaroslav Ježek on the piano. After finishing studies in Vsetín he moved to
Prague
Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...
followed by his parents. Tichý graduated in 1959 at
Charles University in Prague. He stayed there tutoring as an assistant from 1961 to 1968 at the department of Logic in the Faculty of Philosophy. One of his other hobbies was carpentry. He was said to be a perfectionist in everything he did, whether he was learning a foreign language or making a table.
In 1968 he received an invitation from
Exeter University in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
. He was permitted to leave the country even though it was shortly after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in the
Prague Spring. He decided not to return. In 1970 he emigrated with his family to New Zealand, by ship. He started teaching at the
University of Otago
The University of Otago () is a public university, public research university, research collegiate university based in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand. Founded in 1869, Otago is New Zealand's oldest university and one of the oldest universities in ...
in Dunedin, New Zealand where he became Professor of Philosophy at Otago in 1981. Tichý stayed teaching there until his death. He is remembered as a ferocious debater who liked to express his views directly regardless of any bad implications it could have. This made him a lot of friends but also a lot of enemies.
Four years after the
Velvet Revolution, in 1993, Tichý was offered the position of Head of the Department of Logic at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of
Charles University in Prague. He died before taking up this position.
Timeline
*
PhDr. (
Charles University, 1959), thesis: ''Výklad Gödelovy věty o neúplnosti v prosté teorii typů''
Gödel's Gödel's incompleteness theorems">Incompleteness Theorem in the type theory">Simple Theory of Types
The type theory was initially created to avoid paradoxes in a variety of formal logics and rewrite systems. Later, type theory referred to a class of formal systems, some of which can serve as alternatives to naive set theory as a foundation f ...
'']
*List of doctoral degrees awarded by country#Czech Republic, Candidate of Sciences (Charles University, 1964), thesis: ''Vyčíslitelnost ve vztahu k teoriím'' [''On Computability w.r.t. Theories'']
*
Systems''
* Associate Professor, University of Otago, 1978
* Professor, University of Otago, 1981
* P. Tichý (1988): ''The Foundations of Frege's Logic''. De Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1988, 333 pp.,
* V. Svoboda, B. Jespersen, C. Cheyne (Eds.) (2004): ''Pavel Tichý's Collected Papers in Logic and Philosophy''. Filosofia, Prague and Otago University Press, Dunedin, 901 pp.,