Wanda Szmielew

Wanda Szmielew née Montlak (5 April 1918 – 27 August 1976) was a Polish mathematical logician who first proved the decidability of the first-order theory of abelian groups.

In 1949 and 1950, Szmielew visited the University of California, Berkeley, where Tarski had found a permanent position after being exiled from Poland for the war. She lived in the home of Tarski and his wife as Tarski's mistress, leaving her husband behind in Poland, and completed a Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1950 under Tarski's supervision, with her dissertation consisting of her work on abelian groups. For the 1955 journal publication of these results, Tarski convinced Szmielew to rephrase her work in terms of his theory of arithmetical functions, a decision that caused this work to be described by Solomon Feferman as "unreadable". Later work by re-proved Szmielew's result using more standard model-theoretic techniques.

Returning to Warsaw as an assistant professor, her interests shifted to the foundations of geometry. With Karol Borsuk, she published a text on the subject in 1955 (translated into English in 1960), and another monograph, published posthumously in 1981 and (in English translation) 1983.

She died of cancer on 27 August 1976 in Warsaw.

Selected publications . . . Translated as . . Translated as . .