Evert Willem Beth

Evert Willem Beth (7 July 1908 – 12 April 1964) was a Dutch philosopher and logician, whose work principally concerned the foundations of mathematics.

Beth was born in Almelo, a small town in the eastern Netherlands.

His father had studied mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam, where he had been awarded a PhD.

Apart from two brief interruptions – a stint in 1951 as a research assistant to Alfred Tarski, and in 1957 as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University – he held the post in Amsterdam continuously until his death in 1964.

His was the first academic post in his country in logic and the foundations of mathematics, and during this time he contributed actively to international cooperation in establishing logic as an academic discipline.

It is a semantic method—like Wittgenstein's truth tables or J. Alan Robinson's resolution—as opposed to the proof of theorems in a formal system, such as the axiomatic systems employed by Frege, Russell and Whitehead, and Hilbert, or even Gentzen's natural deduction.

This method is considered by many to be intuitively simple, particularly for students who are not acquainted with the study of logic, and it is faster than the truth-table method (which requires a table with 2n rows for a sentence with n propositional letters).

, given a set of rules determined by the semantics of the formulae's connectives (and quantifiers, in first-order logic).