Leon Chwistek

Leon Chwistek ( born June 13, 1884 in Krakow, † August 20 1944 in the village Barvikha (Russian Барвиха ) in Moscow) was a Polish mathematician, painter, art theorist, philosopher and poet.

Biography

Chwistek, one of the greatest all-rounders of the 20th century worked for twenty years from 1906 to 1926 full-time as a secondary school teacher in Krakow, interrupted only by his service in the Polish Legions during World War II. He had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, but at the same time attended lectures on mathematics and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University and received his doctorate there. He also heard lectures in Göttingen with David Hilbert and in Paris with Henri Poincaré. From 1922 he was a lecturer in mathematics at the Jagiellonian University and from 1930 to 1941 professor of mathematical logic at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lvov, where he asserted itself in the application against Alfred Tarski. A role was played by the intercession of Bertrand Russell, with its type theory Chwistek had dealt intensively, Stefan Banach and Hugo Steinhaus ( whose brother was Chwistek ). Shortly before the German invasion of the city in June 1941, he fled to the Soviet troops to the east and settled down for the next two years in Tbilisi, where he taught mathematical analysis. In 1943 he went to Moscow, where he collaborated with the Communist Federation of Polish Patriots Wanda Wasilewskas. In 1944 he died near Moscow.

Work

The greatest influence exercised Chwistek undoubtedly with his philosophical theory of the diversity of realities. In his opinion, there are four basic types of reality:

These four types he ordered in painting four styles to:

Chwistek defended this "common sense" against any form of metaphysics. With his model, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz his best friend refused decided it belongs in some way to the forefathers of postmodernism. In painting Chwistek regarded as the founder Formist, a Polish avant-garde movement that was related to the Futurism and Cubism.

Publications

  • The limits of science: outline of logic and of the methodology of the exact sciences, New York, 1948 ( in Polish: Granice nauki, 1935).
  • Wielość rzeczywistości w sztuce ( multiplicity of reality in art ), 1918
  • The Theory of Constructive Types, 1923
  • Zagadnienia kultury duchowej w Polsce ( problems of intellectual culture in Poland ), 1933
Union of Polish Patriots Impressionism Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz Integrated Authority File
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