Lindenbaum Method

Abstract

During his brief life, the Polish mathematician and logician Adolf Lindenbaum (1904--1941) contributed to mathematical logic, among other things, by several significant achievements. Some results of Lindenbaum's, which bear his name, were published without proofs by other people from the Lvov--Warsaw School and the proofs later were provided by some others, though the authorship of Lindenbaum has never been challenged. Many may have heard about Lindenbaum's lemma, asserting the existence of Lindenbaum's extension, and Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra; less known is Lindenbaum's logical matrix. This tutorial is devoted to the two last concepts rather than the first one. However, the latter can be understood in a purely algebraic fashion, if one employs the notion of Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra. In general, the notions of Lindenbaum matrix and Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra have paved a way to further algebraization of logic, which had been begun by George Boole in the 19th century, as well as to a new branch of logic, model theory. For this reason, the present tutorial is also a gentle introduction to algebraic logic. A uniting idea of the aforementioned concepts is a special view on the formal judgments of a formal language. It is this view we call the Lindenbaum method. Although Lindenbaum expressed merely a starting viewpoint in the tradition of Polish logic of the time, this viewpoint became a standard ever since and its development goes on until this day, continuing to shape the field of algebraic logic. Our main objective is to demonstrate how this view gave rise to formulating the aforementioned concepts and how it opens door to unexplored paths.