Jan Łukasiewicz

In 1902, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree under the patronage of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, who gave him a special doctoral ring with diamonds.^[6]

He spent three years as a private teacher, and in 1905, he received a scholarship to complete his philosophy studies at the

In 1915, he was invited to lecture as a full professor at the University of Warsaw, which the German occupation authorities had reopened after it had been closed down by the Tsarist government in the 19th century.^[6]

In 1919, Łukasiewicz left the university to serve as Polish Minister of Religious Denominations and Public Education in Paderewski's government until 1920. Łukasiewicz led the development of a Polish curriculum replacing the Russian, German and Austrian curricula that had been used in partitioned Poland. The Łukasiewicz curriculum emphasized the early acquisition of logical and mathematical concepts.^{[citation needed]}

In 1928, he married Regina Barwińska.^[6]

He remained a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1920 until 1939, when the family house was destroyed by German bombs, and the university was closed by the German occupation. He had been a rector of the university twice during which Łukasiewicz and

In February 1946, at the invitation of Irish political leader Éamon de Valera, Łukasiewicz and his wife relocated to Dublin, where they remained until his death there a decade later. In Ireland, he briefly served as Professor of Mathematical Logic at the Royal Irish Academy (a position created for him). His duties involved giving frequent public lectures.^[7]

During this period, his book Elements of Mathematical Logic was published in English by Macmillan (1963, translated from Polish by Olgierd Wojtasiewicz).

Jan Łukasiewicz died on 13 February 1956. He was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, in Dublin. At the urging of the Armenian community in Poland, his remains were repatriated to Poland 66 years later. He was reburied on 22 November 2022 in Warsaw's Old Powązki Cemetery.^[8]

From October to December 2022, the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin hosted an exhibition on his life and work.^[9]

Łukasiewicz's papers (post-1945) are held by the University of Manchester Library.

Work

A number of axiomatizations of

Łukasiewicz invented the Polish notation (named after his nationality) for the logical connectives around 1920. A quotation from a paper by Jan Łukasiewicz in 1931^{[10]: 367, Footnote 3) [11]: 180, Footnote 3)} states how the notation was invented:

I came upon the idea of a parenthesis-free notation in 1924. I used that notation for the first time in my article Łukasiewicz (1), p. 610, footnote.

The reference cited by Łukasiewicz, i.e., Łukasiewicz (1),^[12] is apparently a lithographed report in Polish. The referring paper^[10] by Łukasiewicz was reviewed by Henry A. Pogorzelski in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1965.^[13]

In Łukasiewicz's 1951 book, Aristotle's Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic, he mentions that the principle of his notation was to write the functors before the arguments to avoid brackets (i.e., parentheses) and that he had employed his notation in his logical papers since 1929.^[3]: 78 He then goes on to cite, as an example, a 1930 paper he wrote with Alfred Tarski on the sentential calculus.^[14]

This notation is the root of the idea of the