Bernays

Paul Isaac Bernays

Born: 17 Oct 1888 in London, England
Died: 18 Sept 1977 in Zurich, Switzerland

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Paul Bernays studied in Berlin and Göttingen, where he obtained his doctorate in 1912, working first with Landau and then with Zermelo. He was friends with Pólya, Einstein and Weyl while in Zurich and he worked with Hilbert from 1917 until the Nazi regime of 1933 forced him to go to Zurich.

Bernays attempted to put set theory on an axiomatic basis to avoid the paradoxes. He is best known for his joint two volume work Grundlagen der Mathematik (1934-39) with Hilbert. This attempted to build mathematics from symbolic logic.

In 1958 Bernays published Axiomatic Set Theory in which he simplified and extended von Neumann's work on logic and set theory. His work in this area was taken further by Gödel.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about Bernays's work on set theory

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. G Takeuti, Work of Paul Bernays and Kurt Gödel, Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VI (1982), 77-85.
  4. G H Müller, Paul J Bernays (1888-1977), Mathematical Intelligencer 1 (1978), 27-28.
  5. G H Müller (ed.), Sets and classes : on the work by Paul Bernays (Amsterdam, 1976). 
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JOC/EFR February 1996