Raymond Merrill Smullyan (/ˈsmʌliən/; May 25, 1919 – February 6, 2017)[1][2][3] was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher.
His father was Isidore Smullyan, a Russian-born businessman who emigrated to Belgium when young and graduated from the University of Antwerp, his native language being French.
His mother was Rosina Smullyan (née Freeman), a painter and actress born and raised in London.
[5] Smullyan showed musical talent from a young age, playing both violin and piano.
He sat in on a course taught by Ernest Nagel at Columbia University that was being taken by his cousin, Arthur Smullyan, and independently discovered Boolean rings.
[5] Smullyan audited classes at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to New York, where he continued his independent study of modern abstract algebra.
At this time he composed a number of chess problems which were published many years later; he also learned magic.
At the age of 24, Smullyan enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for three semesters, because he wanted to study modern algebra with a professor whose book he had read.
Of the other two term papers, one, entitled "Languages in which Self-Reference is Possible" (which Carnap showed to Kurt Gödel), was later published in 1957.
While still a student at the University of Chicago, on the basis of a recommendation from Carnap, he was hired by John G. Kemeny, the chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth College.
He completed his doctoral dissertation, titled "Theory of formal systems", under the supervision of Alonzo Church, which was published in 1961.
[12] While a graduate student at Princeton he met his second wife, Blanche, a pianist and teacher, born in Belgium, to whom he was married for 48 years until she died in 2006.
While a PhD student, Smullyan's term paper for Carnap, "Languages in which Self-Reference is Possible", was published in 1957 in the Journal of Symbolic Logic,[13] showing that Gödelian incompleteness held for formal systems considerably more elementary than that of Kurt Gödel's 1931 landmark paper.
[16] He was subsequently a professor of philosophy at Indiana University, where he taught both undergraduate and graduate students.
His book Forever Undecided popularizes Gödel's incompleteness theorems by phrasing them in terms of reasoners and their beliefs, rather than formal systems and what can be proved in them.
Finally the novella culminates in Inspector Craig (and the reader) solving the crime, utilizing the mathematical and logical principles learned.
[citation needed] His book To Mock a Mockingbird (1985) is a recreational introduction to the subject of combinatory logic.
Apart from writing about and teaching logic, Smullyan released a recording of his favorite baroque keyboard and classical piano pieces by composers such as Bach, Scarlatti, and Schubert.
Some recordings are available on the Piano Society website, along with the video "Rambles, Reflections, Music and Readings".
One of Smullyan's discussions of Taoist philosophy centers on the question of free will in an imagined conversation between a mortal human and God.