HILBERT, D. UND W. ACKERMANN. - THE FOUNDATION OF MODERN MATHEMATICAL LOGIC.

Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik.

Berlin, Springer, 1928.

8vo. Uncut in orig. printed wrappers. VIII,120. With the name of Bent Schultzer (Former Danish professor in philosophy) on first leaf. Internally clean.

First edition. (Die Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenshaften in Einzeldarstellungen, Band XXVII).

In the years 1917-22 Hilbert gave three seminal courses at the Univeristy og Göttingen on logic and the foundation of mathematics. He received considerable help in preperation and eventual write up of these lectures from Bernays. This material was subsequently reworked by Ackermann into the monograph 'Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik' (the offered item). It containes the first exposition ever of first-order logic and poses the problem of its completeness and the decision problem ('Entscheidungsproblem'). The first of these questions was answered just a year later by Kurt Gödel in his doctorial dissertation 'Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls'. This result is known as Gödel's completeness theorem. Two years later Gödel published his famous 1931 paper 'Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I' in which he showed that a stronger logic, capable of modeling arithmetic, is either incomplete or inconsistent (Gödel's second incompleteness theorem). The later question posed by Hilbert and Ackermann regarding the decision problem was answered in 1936 independantly by Alonzo Church and Allan Turing. Church used his model the lambda-calculus and Turing his machine model to construct undecidable problems and show that the decision problem is unsolvable in first-order logic. These results by Gödel, Church, and Turing rank amongst the most important contributions to mathematical logic ever.

Order-nr.: 49908