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  • Dec 17, 2025, 9:40 AM

    Yesterday I went to visit my old Philosophy Department, and I saw this poster on one of the professor's doors (bearing the title "Mathematical Logic and Foundations 1847-1947" and crediting Joel Friedman as its author, and providing 1976 as the creation year), and I felt that I have to share it on Mastodon (if nothing else, then just for the sake of writing alt text ;D)

    It's around 3MB, so sorry about that, but I didn't want it to reduce it to make sure the letters remain legible.

    I also found this write-up about the poster: dailynous.com/2014/10/28/mathe

    At the top, there's the inscription:

MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND FOUNDATIONS 1847-1947

below is a diagram that resembles a two-headed creature.

The left head is captioned "DeMorgan", and it contains "DeMorgan's Laws (1847)" and "Logic of Relations (1859)"

The right head is "Boole" and it contaions "Laws of Boolean Algebra, 1847"

Between is a smaller circle captioned "Jevons" with "Logic Machine (1869)", and right below it - "mrs. Ladd-Franklin" with "Numerical test for validity of syllogism (c. 1880)"

Then at the level of chest there are Frege and Cantor with numerous contributions.

At the same level is left arm, with a Venn Diagram of Peirce, Venn and Schroeder. The right arm is Weierstrass. Then Frege is connected to Russell (at the level of pelvis) with a strip captioned "propositional logic", and Cantor is similarly connected to Hilbert with "predicate logic". In the middle of pelvis is Zermelo.

The left arm is extended to the fist captioned "Whitehead". The right arm consists of two long forearms captioned Peano and Dedekind, which reaches three fingers? - Brouwer, Lovenheim and Weyl.

Now from the pelvis there are monster's two legs: Post and Skolem, and there's a "Fraenkel" circle dangling between them. The left foot of the monster is Tarski, the right foot - Goedel, and between them is von Neumann. There's also Gentzen and Bernays placed between the 3 feet. There's also Lewis, Nicod, Wittgenstein, Lukasiewicz, Schoenfinkel, Herbrand, Church, Turing and a few others
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