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Jean van Heijenoort (prounounced highenort) (July 23 1912, Creil France - March 29 1986, Mexico City) was a pioneer historian of mathematical logic. He was also a personal secretary to Leon Trotsky from 1932 to 1939, and from then until 1947, an American Trotskyist activist.

Life

The biography Feferman (1993) reveals a curious human being.

France

Van Heijenoort came of age in straightened family circumstances because his Dutch immigrant father died when he was two. He nevertheless acquired a powerful traditional French formal education, to which his French writings attest. (He also published in Spanish.) Although he eventually became a naturalized citizen of the USA, he visited France twice a year from 1958 until his death, and remained very attached to his French extended family and friends.

Trotsky

In 1932, he joined the Trotskyist movement (recruited by Yves Craipeau) and the Communist League. Very soon thereafter, the recently exiled Trotsky hired Van Heijenoort as a secretary and bodyguard, primarily because of his fluency in Russian, German, and English. Thus began seven years in Trotsky's household, during which he served as an all-purpose translator, helping Trotsky write several books and keep up an extensive intellectual and political correspondence in several languages.

In 1939, Van Heijenoort moved to New York to be with his second wife, where he worked for the Socialist Workers Party (US) and wrote a number of articles for the American Trotskyite and other radical presses. He was elected to the secretariat of the Fourth International in 1940 but resigned when Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman, with whom he had sided, left the SWP to join the US Workers Party. In 1947, he was expelled from the SWP. In 1948, he published an article, signed "Jean Vannier," in the Partisan Review abjuring Marxism.

Van Heijenoort was spared the ordeal of McCarthyism, and otherwise having to pay a price in later life for his youthful radicalism, because everything he published in Trotskyist organs appeared under one of more than a dozen pen names *. Moreover, Feferman (1993) states that Van Heijenoort the logician was quite reticent about his Trotskyist youth, and had no known political inclinations. Nevertheless, in his last decade of life he contributed to the ongoing history of the Trotskyist movement by writing the monograph Van Heijenoort (1978), by editing a volume of Trotsky's correspondence (Van Heijenoort 1980), and by advising and working with the archivists at Harvard University's Houghton library, which holds much of Trotsky's papers from his years in exile.

Logic

After completing a Ph.D. in mathematics at New York University in 1949, he taught mathematics there but evolved into a logician and philosopher of mathematics, in good part because of the influence of Georg Kreisel. He began teaching philosophy, first part-time at Columbia University, then full-time at Brandeis University, 1965-77. He spent much of his last decade at Stanford University, writing and editing 8 books, including the Collected Works of Kurt Gödel.

The Source Book (Van Heijenoort 1967), perhaps the most important book ever published on the history of logic and of the foundations of mathematics, is an anthology of translations. It includes the first complete translation of Frege's 1879 Begriffschrifft, and 45 other historically important short pieces on mathematical logic and axiomatic set theory published between 1889 and 1931, the year of Gödel's classic paper on the incompletability of Peano arithmetic. For more background on the period 1879-1931, see Grattan-Guinness (2000).

Nearly all the content of the Source Book was difficult to access in all but the best North American university libraries (e.g., even the Library of Congress did not acquire a copy of the Begriffschrifft until 1964), and all but four pieces had to be translated from one of 6 continental European languages. When possible, the author of the original text was asked to review the translation of his work, and suggest corrections and amendments. Each piece included editorial footnotes and an introduction, all references were combined into one list, and many misprints, inconsistencies, and errors in the originals were corrected. Especially important are the remarkable introductions to each translation, most written by Van Heijenoort himself. A few were written by Willard Quine.

The Source Book did much to advance the view that modern logic begins with, and builds on, the Begriffschrifft. Ironically, Van Heijenoort (1967a) is oft-cited by those who prefer the alternative model theoretic stance on logic and foundations. On that stance, whose leading lights include George Boole, Charles Peirce, Ernst Schröder, Leopold Löwenheim, Thoralf Skolem, Alfred Tarski, and Jaakko Hintikka, see Brady (2000). The Source Book deliberately scanted Peirce and Schröder, but devoted more pages to Skolem than to anyone other than Frege, and included Löwenheim (1915), considered the founding paper on model theory.

Lover

Two of Van Heijenoort's four wives bore him a child. While living with Trotsky in Coyoacan, now a neighborhood of Mexico City, Van Heijenoort's first wife left him after clashing with Trotsky's spouse. Van Heijenoort was also one of Frida Kahlo's lovers; in the film Frida, he is played by Felipe Fulop. Having parted company with Trotsky in 1939 for personal reasons, Van Heijenoort was innocent of all circumstances leading to Trotsky's 1940 murder. Ironically, Van Heijenoort was himself murdered in Mexico City 46 years later, by his estranged fourth spouse whom he was visiting at the time. She then took her own life.

Selected works

  • 1967a. "Logic as Language and Logic as Calculus," Synthese 17: 324-30.
  • 1978. With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan. Harvard Uni. Press.
  • 1985. Selected Essays. Napoli: Bibliopolis.

Van Heijenoort edited or co-edited several scholarly editions:

Secondary Literature

  • Brady, Geraldine, 2000. From Peirce to Skolem. North Holland.
  • Feferman, Anita Burdman, 1993. From Trotsky to Gödel: The Life of Jean Van Heijenoort. Wellesley MA: A. K. Peters. With an Appendix by Solomon Feferman. The Fefermans knew Van Heijenoort professionally and socially for many years.
  • Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots: 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.

External links

1912 births | 1986 deaths | American Trotskyists | Logicians | French Trotskyists

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Jean van Heijenoort".

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