Heinrich Behmann

Heinrich Behmann (1891 to 1970) was a German mathematician who worked in set theory and predicate logic. Born in Bremen-Aumund, he studied mathematics at Tübingen, Leipzig and Göttingen, was wounded in the First World War and received the Iron Cross second class. David Hilbert supervised the preparation of his doctoral thesis on the antinomy of the transfinite number and its resolution by the theory of Russell and Whitehead. In 1922 Behmann proved that the monadic predicate calculus is decidable, a result in the Hilbert school programme on the decision problem. He obtained a professorial chair in mathematics at Halle in 1938, and was dismissed in 1945 because he had been a member of the Nazi Party. He returned to Bremen-Aumund, where he died in 1970.