[FOM] New book on Tarski

[JAMES T SMITH]

Dear FOM members,



I am pleased to announce publication of



Alfred Tarski:  Early Work in Poland-Geometry and Teaching, edited by Andrew and Joanna McFarland and James T. Smith, New York:  Birkhäuser, 2014.



Throughout his career, Alfred Tarski (1901-1983) taught mathematics and logic at universities and in Polish secondary schools. Many of his writings before 1939 were in Polish and remained inaccessible to most mathematicians and historians until now.



This self-contained book focuses on Tarski's early contributions to geometry and mathematics education, including the famous Banach-Tarski paradoxical decomposition of a sphere as well as high-school mathematical topics and pedagogy. These themes are significant, since Tarski's later research on geometry and its foundations stemmed in part from his early employment as a high-school mathematics teacher and teacher-trainer. The book contains careful translations of these works written in Poland before 1939, much of their social background newly uncovered through archival research, and it updates Steven R. Givant's 1986 bibliography of Tarski's works.



Among the translated papers you will find Tarski's first publication (1921), on the axiomatics of well-ordered sets, the famous 1924 paper that he wrote with Stefan Banach, papers by Tarski and Henryk Moese (1931-1932) on the degree of equivalence of polygons with equal area, and Tarski's first publication (1930-1931) on the theory of truth.



With this new book, all of Tarski's publications are now accessible in English, French, or German;  and all of his works on geometry are accessible in English.



For further information, you may consult http://www.springer.com/birkhauser/mathematics/book/978-1-4939-1473-9.





James T. Smith


--------------------------------------
James T. Smith
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
San Francisco State University
mailto:smith at sfsu.edu<mailto:smith at math.sfsu.edu>
http://math.sfsu.edu/smith

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