Gentzen

Gerhard Gentzen

Born: 24 Nov 1909 in Greifswald, Germany
Died: 4 Aug 1945 in Prague, Czechoslovakia

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Gentzen was taught by Bernays, Carathéodory, Courant, Hilbert, Kneser, Landau and Weyl becoming Hilbert's assistant in 1934. He took up a teaching post in Prague but died of malnutrition after 3 months in internment (Gentzen was interned by the liberating forces in 1945).

Gentzen's work was on logic and the foundations of mathematics. He gave a consistency proof for elementary number theory despite the limitations imposed by Gödel's results. Gentzen's was the most outstanding contribution to Hilbert's programme.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. M E Szabo, Collected papers of Gerhard Gentzen, Studies in Logic (Amsterdam, 1969). 
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JOC/EFR February 1996