Moses Schönfinkel

Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic. He was born on 29 September 1888 in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire, now Dnipro in Ukraine, to a Jewish family, and studied mathematics at Novorossiysk University of Odessa. From 1914 to 1924 he was a member of David Hilbert's group at the University of Göttingen, where on 7 December 1920 he gave a talk, Elemente der Logik, outlining the concept of combinatory logic, which Heinrich Behmann later revised and published in 1924. He developed a formal system that avoided the use of bound variables. After leaving Göttingen he returned to Moscow, was reported by 1927 to be mentally ill and in a sanatorium, lived in poverty, and died in Moscow in 1942 or 1943.