Malinowski

Pabianiczanin, profesor Jacek Malinowski - logik i kognitywista -  w książce „Janusz Czelakowski on Logical Consequence” (2024)  wspomina m. in.  jak w latach 80. ubiegłego wieku przygotowywał dysertację doktorską w swoim mieszkaniu przy ul. Buczka (Kościelna) w Pabianicach oraz o nagłym olśnieniu, którego doświadczył na pabianickim dworcu, czekając na pociąg do Łodzi.

(…) The Section of Logic had its own rhythm of work , just then was a summer vacation and from autumn onward regular meetings started. Two-day sessions once a week as I remember those were very intence right from that start. I think we had several seminars, all very import ant: the most significant was the training seminar given by Dr. Janusz Czelakowski and Dr. Wiesław Dziobiak; it was actually a seminar on universal algebra, the other was a seminar on logic, and there Wójcicki presented his earlier results from his book on the theory of the consequence operation.

Also Professor Grzegorz Malinowski had lectures at this seminar. All of them would then appear in my professional life for decades.Grzegorz Malinowski, like me, comes from Pabianice. Despite having the same surname, however, we have no family connection. Grzegorz did not work for the Polish Academy of Sciences, but was one of Wójcicki’s most important collaborators, his right-hand man.

I was to take over his function, but that was much later and under different circumstances. Grzegorz headed the Departament of Logic and Methodology of Science at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Łódź. It was then I first heard that logic was philosophy, rather than mathematics. Then I still did not accept it for years.

(…) I have taken to orthomodular lattices. The goal  was to show that the deduction theorem occurs in no logic semantically defined by the those lattices. This was arrived at using the structural methods developed by Janusz, but my task here was no-trivial. It required a lot of braininess and complicated calculi. I was working at home, on Buczka Street in Pabianice, sitting on the floor and watching TV, rather staring as I could not see what was on.

Once you have dug well into such calculi, a piece of paper and pencil are not necessary, you just have to think about it and appears in front of your eyes like a piece of paper. I perfectly remember the very end, the final daze. There was a gap in the main evidence. I had worked on filling it for a long time, I had all information required in my head, so I worked everywhere and searched from different angles. The flash came at the railway station in Pabianice while I was waiting for a train to Łódź. There are wonderful moments.

I wrote this paper but Janusz contributed largely to the final version. I sent it to the Journal of Symbolic Logic, then the most prestigious logic journal in the world, such as Studia Logica nowdays. The review procedure took a long time, in addition to which I wrote the return address illegibly, so that they read the name of the city as Zodi instaed of Łódź; it was a miracle that it even arrived. The paper did not finalny come out until 1990, because they had a queue of finished papers, but the acceptance was much earlier, around 1988.

I had results, I felt strong. I could already confidently say that I had my doctorate ready with a large surplus, it only remained to wait with the defence for Janusz’s haibiltation. (…)

Profesor  przywołuje także swojego przyjaciela Jana Fijałkowskiego.

I then manager to hre Janek Fijałkowski a friend of mine from my climbing days at the university. (…) The three of them, that is, Marcin, Dorota and Fijał started working quite intensively, they got into algorithms, the automata theory. It made sense and something could have come of it but it failed becausze they did not have enough time. (…)

I have preserved the agenda of a Polish-Bulgarian conference organised by our Section in Toruń in September. This had to do with the exchange programme between us and Bulgaria. Afterwards, Janusz, Dorota and Janek flew to Sofia. (…)

If Janusz had not left for the States, if it had not been for Balcerowicz’s reform, maybe something would have come out of it, at least Dorota and Fijał’s Ph.D.s probably would have. But it did not, there was no time. (…)

Wojtek Dzik is a logician and mountain climber alike.  He is very well known in both environments. He has climbed in the Himalayas, in the Pamir, in the Andes. As he told me, he likes to climbe where there is no civilisation. He is quite a lot older than me. Fijał, who is my climbing guru, has also known him since he started climbing and told me that when he started, Dzik was already an old bird. (…)

Jan Fijałkowski „Fijał” to m. in. wspinacz, mistrz kyudo i jeden z pionierów informatyzacji w  miasteczku.

http://sl.fr.pl - Jacek Malinowski

https://www.zyciepabianic.pl - Są w Pabianicach sportowcy, z których możemy być dumni

Autor: Sławomir Saładaj