Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog,sci.logic
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From: jamie@cs.sfu.ca (Jamie Andrews)
Subject: Re: Herbrand
Message-ID: <1995Apr25.164752.7891@cs.sfu.ca>
Organization: Faculty of Applied Science, Simon Fraser University
References: <3n6cld$o43@dmsoproto.ida.org>
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 16:47:52 GMT
Lines: 29
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.prolog:12797 sci.logic:10410

In article <3n6cld$o43@dmsoproto.ida.org>, Mike Frame <frame@ida.org> wrote:
>Does anyone have biographical information about Jacques Herbrand?
>References?

     I'll tell you what little I know, and maybe the sci.logic
people can fill in more details.

     Jacques Herbrand was a young French man who studied logic,
specifically the aspects of Hilbert's program about finding an
algorithm for deciding the truth of first order logic formulae.
Of course he didn't find an algorithm (his thesis was published
in 1930, the same year as Goedel's incompleteness theorem), but
he did discover a lot of notions relevant to logic and
computation, like unification and what we call the Herbrand base.

     Shortly after finishing and defending his PhD thesis, he
died in a mountaineering accident in the Alps.  It's
unfortunate; if he had lived he would almost certainly have
lived long enough to see Robinson's resolution paper -- if he
had not discovered automated resolution theorem proving himself!

     Now, where I saw all this I don't remember.  Does anyone
have any references?  I seem to remember that someone on
sci.logic was compiling profiles of prominent logicians -- does
that person have any more info?

--Jamie.
  jamie@cs.sfu.ca
"Simon Fraser University would make an elegant ruin" -- Bruno Freschi
