Alfred Tarski and decidable theories

Abstract

Any list of Alfred Tarski's achievements would mention his decision procedure for real-closed fields. He proved a number of other less publicized decidability results too. We shall survey these results. After surveying them we shall ask what Tarski had in mind when he proved them. Today our emphases and concepts are sometimes different from those of Tarski in the early 1930s. Some of these changes are the direct result of Tarski's own fundamental work in model theory during the intervening years.Tarski's work on decidable theories is important not just for the individual decidability theorems themselves. His method for all these decidability results was elimination of quantifiers, and he systematically used this method to prove a range of related theorems about completeness and definability. He also led several of his students to do important work using this same method. Tarski's use of quantifier elimination has had a deep and cumulative influence on model theory and the logical treatment of algebraic theories.We thank Solomon Feferman, Steven Givant, Haragauri Gupta, Yuri Gurevich. Angus Macintyre, Gregory Moore, Robert Vaught and the referee for helpful discussions and comments. Also we thank Madame Maria Mostowska and Roman Murawski for sending us material from Polish libraries.