jack@glasgow.UUCP (08/28/87)
Well? - in particular, has the full version of his consistency proof for ZF
ever been available from anywhere? and what's he done since?
For the uninitiated: this proof was summarized in two papers, one in French
and one in English, dating from around 1968 (the English one was in a
symposium published by North-Holland in one of their yellow books). The
proof starts from an "ultra-intuitionistic" (strict finitist) position,
sidestepping Godel's theorem by not being "formal" in a Godelian sense, and
uses some weird modal (and political!) concepts that extend Wittgenstein's
late philosophy of mathematics a long way.
The only other things by the man I have found are a book of essays called "A
Leaf of Spring" which I found in my local public library many years ago and
which is almost certainly out of print now, and an ancient paper on Suslin's
Hypothesis.
Can somebody that original really vanish without trace? (Kreisel did a brutal
hatchet job on the 1968 papers in a JSL review - is the reach of the Stanford
proof theory police really longer than the KGB's? :-))
-jack
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Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Department, University of Glasgow,
17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland (041 339 8855 x 6045)jas@duke.cs.duke.edu (Jon A. Sjogren) (09/01/87)
I remember talks he gave at Berkeley around 1972. Attendance was large and included Tarski and his wife. I think Y-V was accepting a job at Buffalo at that time. I don't think he was well understood. He set up 1 = infinity (or in-FINE-ity) and rambled on for 3 hours with a heavy accent and a stammer. Can you let me know if you hear anything more about him? I am jas@uxv.larc.nasa.gov.