Pavel Tichý

Pavel Tichý (Czech pronunciation: [ˈpavɛl ˈcɪxiː]; 18 February 1936 Brno, Czechoslovakia – 26 October 1994 Dunedin, New Zealand) was a Czech logician, philosopher and mathematician. He worked in the field of intensional logic and founded Transparent Intensional Logic, an original theory of the logical analysis of natural languages – the theory is devoted to the problem of saying exactly what it is that we learn, know and can communicate when we come to understand what a sentence means. He spent roughly 25 years working on it. His main work is a book The Foundations of Frege's Logic, published by Walter de Gruyter in 1988.

Early life and education

Tichý was born in Brno in 1936. His father was an insurance clerk. His family lived in Zlín until 1948 when they moved to Vsetín. At school he was already a brilliant student. He also liked playing music of Jaroslav Ježek on the piano. After finishing studies in Vsetin he moved to Prague followed by his parents. Tichý graduated in 1959 at Charles University in Prague. He stayed there tutoring as an assistant from 1961 to 1968 at the department of Logic at Faculty of Philosophy. One of his other hobbies was carpentry. He was said to be perfectionist in everything he did, whether he was learning a foreign language or making a table.