Jean van Heijenoort
Jean Louis Maxime van Heijenoort ( born July 23, 1912 in Creil, † March 29, 1986 in Mexico City) was a French mathematical logician, known for work in the history of logic, and Trotskyist. From 1932 to 1939 Heijenoort was personal secretary to Leon Trotsky.
Life and work
Van Heijenoort grew up as the son of a Dutchman in France. In 1932 he became a Trotskyist and, mainly because of his language skills ( he spoke fluent Russian, German, French, English, Spanish), secretary and bodyguard to Leon Trotsky on the island of Buyukada, later in Mexico City. Even before Trotsky's assassination in 1940, he left for personal reasons of this and moved in 1939 with his second wife, Beatrice Bunny Guyer to New York, where he worked for the Socialist Workers Party. In 1940 he became secretary of the Fourth International, but stepped back as Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman within the SWP formed a moderate fraction and were eventually excluded from this as well Heijenoort 1947. In an article in " Partisan Review " under the pseudonym Jean Vannier he swore in 1948 from Marxism. Even otherwise, he published his Trotskyist article under a pseudonym, which helped that he escaped persecution during the McCarthy era. Later he spoke only reticent to his political past, but supported the archives for the Houghton Library at Harvard University in the order of the papers from Trotsky's estate and was also a band of Trotsky's correspondence published in 1980. In 1978 he wrote a book about his time Trotsky. He was shot by his fourth, his now estranged wife, when he visited her in Mexico City. Then took his own life.
In 1949 he received his doctorate from New York University in mathematics at JJ Stoker with a differential geometric work (On locally convex surfaces ), then turned under the influence of Georg Kreisel philosophy of mathematics and logic. He taught philosophy (at first only part-time ) at Columbia University, and from 1965 to 1977 as a professor at Brandeis University. After that, he was at Stanford University, where he was involved in the publication of the works of Kurt Gödel. He is best known for his 1967 published Source Book in Mathematical Logic, contains the English translations of many historically important works, including the first complete translation of Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift. It ends with the translation of Gödel's work from 1931 through its incompleteness. Most of this work were previously very difficult to access. Heijenoort also provided comments to the work (as well as Willard van Orman Quine and Burton Dreben ) and corrected printing errors and other errors. The book has been (especially the omission of Ernst Schröder, Charles S. Peirce, the highlighting of Frege against Giuseppe Peano ) also criticized for its omissions ..
Heijenoort had the U.S. and French citizenship. He also appears as a character in the film Frida by Julie Taymor in 2002, as one of Frida Kahlo's lovers in Mexico City. He was married four times.
Writings
- Logic as Language and Logic as Calculus, Synthesis, Vol 17, 1967 p.324 - 30th
- With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard University Press 1978
- Selected Essays. Bibliopolis, Naples 1985
As the editor:
- From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931. Harvard University Press 1967, reprint 1977.
- Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, Vols. I, II, Oxford Univ. Press. 1986, 1990
- Jacques Herbrand: Ecrits logiques. Presses Universitaires de France.
- Leon et Natalia Trotsky: Correspondance 1933-38, Paris, Gallimard, 1980.