Jan Łukasiewicz (; 21 December 1878 – 13 February 1956) was a Polish logician and philosopher who is best known for Polish notation and Łukasiewicz logic.

He finished his gymnasium studies in philology and in 1897 went on to Lemberg University, where he studied philosophy and mathematics. He was a pupil of the philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski.

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

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

Work

A number of axiomatizations of classical propositional logic are due to Łukasiewicz. A particularly elegant axiomatization features a mere three axioms and is still invoked to the present day. He was a pioneer investigator of multi-valued logics; his three-valued propositional calculus, introduced in 1917, was the first explicitly axiomatized non-classical logical calculus. He wrote on the philosophy of science, and his approach to the making of scientific theories was similar to the thinking of Karl Popper.

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 states how the notation was invented:

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

Further reading

  • "Curriculum Vitae of Jan Łukasiewicz", Rome, Italy: Metalogicon journal, (1994) VII, 2 (July–December issue).
  • Craig, Edward (general editor), "Article: Jan Łukasiewicz", Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998, Volume 5, pp. 860–863.
  • ; Słupecki, Jerzy, "The Logical Works of J. Łukasiewicz", Studia Logica 8 (1958), 7–56. JSTOR 20013604. (51 pages)
  • Kotarbiński, Tadeusz, "Jan Łukasiewicz's Works on the History of Logic", Studia Logica 8 (1958), 57–63<!-- or 62? --> JSTOR 20013605. (7 pages)
  • Kwiatkowski, Tadeusz, "Jan Łukasiewicz – A historian of logic", Organon 16–17 (1980–1981), 169–188.
  • Marshall Jr., David, "Łukasiewicz, Leibniz and the arithmetization of the syllogism", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 18 (2) (1977), 235–242.
  • Łukasiewicz entry at Polish Philosophy Page, ed. by Francesco Coniglione (University of Catania)