雷蒙·梅里儿·思木里安

雷蒙德·梅里儿·思木里安（英语：Raymond Smullyan，1919年5月25日—2017年2月6日）出生于纽约皇后区的远洛克威，2017年2月6日逝世于纽约市，是一位美国数学家，逻辑学家，哲学家，魔术师和钢琴家，著有多部有关逻辑和哲学的科普书籍。

生平

思木里安出生于纽约皇后区洛克威半岛，中学期间辍学。退学后，他接受了专业的钢琴培训并于芝加哥罗斯福学院担任钢琴教师。但不幸的是，右臂肌腱炎使他不得不放弃了专业钢琴教师生涯而转向数学。在换了一所大学后，他进入芝加哥大学学习，在此期间，思木里安为了赚学费，在俱乐部中以魔术师的身份打工，后终于在1955年拿到数学专业本科学位。1959年，他在普林斯顿大学完成了他的数学博士研究，以题为正式系统理论的论文获得了阿隆佐·邱奇教授的博士学位。自1961年以来，思木里安陆续在普林斯顿大学、犹太大学和纽约城市大学教授数学和逻辑学。1982年退休后，他被任命为印第安纳大学哲学系名誉教授。

轶事

罗纳德斯穆里安和他老婆相识于大学期间，为了接近他老婆，他对他老婆说：“你好，我将会在纸上写一句关于你的话，你看完如果觉得我说的对，那么请你送给我一张你的照片可以吗？”

他老婆答应了他的请求，结果发现纸上写的是“你不会亲吻我，也不想把你的照片给我”

Raymond Merrill Smullyan (May 25, 1919 – February 6, 2017) was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher.

Born in Far Rockaway, New York, Smullyan's first career choice was in stage magic. He earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. Smullyan is one of many logicians to have studied with Alonzo Church.

Life

Smullyan was born on May 25, 1919, in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. His father was Isidore Smullyan, a Russian-born businessman who emigrated to Belgium when young and graduated from the Saint-Ignatius College of Commerce, his native language being French. His mother was Rosina Smullyan (née Freeman), a painter and actress born and raised in London. Both parents were musical, his father playing the violin and his mother playing the piano. Smullyan was the youngest of three children. His eldest brother, Emile Benoit Smullyan, later became an economist under the name of Emile Benoit. His sister was Gladys Smullyan, later Gladys Gwynn. His cousin was the philosopher Arthur Francis Smullyan (1912–1998). In Far Rockaway he was a grade school classmate of Richard Feynman.

Smullyan showed musical talent from a young age, playing both violin and piano. He studied with pianist Grace Hofheimer in New York. He had perfect pitch. He started his interest in logic at the age of 5. In 1931 he won a gold medal in the piano competition of the New York Music Week Association when he was aged 12 (the previous year he had won the silver medal). After graduating from grade school, the Depression forced his family to move to Manhattan, and he attended Theodore Roosevelt High School in The Bronx. He played violin in the school orchestra but devoted more time to playing the piano. At high school he fell in love with mathematics when he took a class in geometry. Apart from his classes in geometry, physics, and chemistry, however, he was dissatisfied with his high school, and dropped out. Smullyan studied mathematics on his own, including analytic geometry, calculus, and modern higher algebra – particularly group theory and Galois theory. He sat in on a course taught by Ernest Nagel at Columbia University that was being taken by his cousin, Arthur Smullyan, and independently discovered Boolean rings. He also spent a year at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Smullyan did not graduate with a high school diploma, but he took the College Board exams to get into college. He studied mathematics and music at Pacific University in Oregon for one semester, and at Reed College for less than a semester, before following the pianist Bernhard Abramowitsch to San Francisco. Smullyan audited classes at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to New York, where he continued his independent study of modern abstract algebra. At this time he composed a number of chess problems which were published many years later; he also learned magic.