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RIP Raymond Smullyan

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Saturday, 11 February 2017, at 9:25 p.m.

In Response To: RIP Raymond Smullyan (mamabear)

Sorry to hear the news. All good things must come to an end.

Smullyan was more than just a creator of logic puzzles. To get a taste of his diverse interests, you can read Reflections: The Magic, Music, and Mathematics of Raymond Smullyan or Four Lives: A Celebration of Raymond Smullyan.

I'm not aware that Smullyan ever turned his attention to backgammon, but his Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes may appeal to BGO readers. These are "retrograde analysis" problems where you are given a position and have to deduce something about what happened earlier in the game.

Even professional mathematicians may not be aware of Smullyan's scholarly contributions. Perhaps his most original mathematical work was his book Set Theory and the Continuum Problem, co-authored with Melvin Fitting. This book presents an advanced technique in set theory called "forcing" from the point of view of modal logic. Although forcing has been studied by hundreds of logicians and set theorists, I believe that Fitting and Smullyan were the first to show how to develop the subject using modal logic.

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