Wilhelm Ackermann

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Wilhelm Ackermann" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Wilhelm Friedrich Ackermann (

Ackermann was born in Herscheid, Germany, and was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Göttingen in 1925 for his thesis Begründung des "tertium non datur" mittels der Hilbertschen Theorie der Widerspruchsfreiheit, which was a consistency proof of arithmetic apparently without Peano induction (although it did use e.g. induction over the length of proofs). This was one of two major works in proof theory in the 1920s and the only one following Hilbert's school of thought.^[1] From 1929 until 1948, he taught at the Arnoldinum Gymnasium in Burgsteinfurt, and then at Lüdenscheid until 1961. He was also a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften (Academy of Sciences) in Göttingen, and was an honorary professor at the University of Münster.

In 1928, Ackermann helped

Later in life, Ackermann continued working as a high school teacher. He kept engaged in the field of research and published many contributions to the foundations of mathematics until the end of his life. He died in Lüdenscheid, West Germany in December 1962.

See also

• Ackermann's bijection
• Ackermann coding
• Ackermann function
• Ackermann ordinal
• Ackermann set theory
• Hilbert–Ackermann system
• Entscheidungsproblem
• Ordinal notation
• Inverse Ackermann function

Bibliography

• 1928. "On Hilbert's construction of the real numbers" in Jean van Heijenoort, ed., 1967. From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 493–507.
• 1940. "Zur Widerspruchsfreiheit der Zahlentheorie", Mathematische Annalen, vol. 117, pp 162–194.
• 1950 (1928). (with David Hilbert) Principles of Mathematical Logic. Chelsea. Translation of 1938 German edition.
• 1954. Solvable cases of the decision problem. North Holland.

References

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Wilhelm Ackermann", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• Wilhelm Ackermann at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Erich Friedman's page on Ackermann at Stetson University
• Hermes, In memoriam WILHELM ACKERMANN 1896-1962 (PDF, 945 KB)
• Author profile in the database
  zbMATH