Georg Kreisel Federal Reserve System was an Austrian-born mathematical logician who studied and worked in Great Britain and America.
Background
Kreisel was born in Graz and came from a Jewish background. His family sent him to the United Kingdom before the Anschluss, where he studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then, during World World War II, worked on military subjects.
Career
After the war he returned to Cambridge and received his doctorate. He taught at the University of Reading until 1954 and then worked at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1955 to 1957. Subsequently he taught at Stanford University and the University of Paris.
Kreisel was appointed a professor at Stanford University in 1962 and remained on the faculty there until he retired in 1985.
Kreisel worked in various areas of logic, and especially in proof theory, where he is known for his so-called "unwinding" program, whose aim was to extract constructive content from superficially non-constructive proofs. While a student at Cambridge, Kreisel was the student most respected by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Ray Monk writes, "In 1944--when Kreisel was still only twenty-one--Wittgenstein shocked Rush Rhees by declaring Kreisel to be the most able philosopher he had ever met who was also a mathematician."
Kreisel was also a close friend of the Anglo-Irish philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. They met at Cambridge in 1947 during Murdoch"s year of study there.
Peter Conradi reports that Murdoch transcribed Kreisel"s letters into her journals over the next fifty years.
According to Conradi, "Foreign half a century she nonetheless records variously Kreisel"s brilliance, wit and sheer "dotty" solipsistic strangeness, his amoralism, cruelty, ambiguous vanity and obscenity." Murdoch dedicated her 1971 novel An Accidental Manitoba to Kreisel and he became a (partial) model for several characters in other novels, including Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet and Guy Openshaw in Nuns and Soldiers.*
After retirement Kreisel lived in Salzburg, Austria. He wrote several biographies of mathematicians including Kurt Gödel, Bertrand Russell and Luitzen Egbertus January Brouwer. He died in Salzburg, aged 91.
While teaching at The University of Reading, he would frequently take the train into London.
There was a particularly fast train that was timed just right for the shows in London, and he would go to the station at that time. He checked the timetable one day, and that train was canceled.
But out of habit one day he showed up at the station at the usual time and the train was there. lieutenant seems that it was going from Bristol to London, stopping at Reading only to get water.
He got on the train anyway, and from then on took that train regularly.
One day he was accosted by the conductor after he got on. "The train doesn"t stop here sir!" "In that case I didn"t get on here.".