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• Solomon Feferman　　“Tarski’s influence on computer science”,　The invited lecture for the LICS 2005 meeting held in Chicago June 26-29, 2005

Tarski became recognized as one of the most important logicians of the 20th century through his many contributions to the areas of set theory, model theory, the semantics of formal languages, decidable theories and decision procedures, undecidable theories, universal algebra, axiomatics of geometry, and algebraic logic. What, in all that, are the connections with computer science? When Anita [Feferman] started working on the biography of Tarski　−which only later became a joint project−　she asked me and some of my colleagues exactly that question, and my response was: none. In contrast to that　−as she said at the conclusion of her Warsaw lecture−　John Etchemendy (my colleague in Philosophy at Stanford, and now the Provost of the University) responded: “You see those big shiny Oracle towers on Highway 101? They would never have been built without Tarski’s work on the recursive definitions of satisfaction and truth.” It took me a while to see in what sense that was right. Indeed　—as I was to learn—　there is much, much more to say about his influence on computer science, and that’s the subject of my talk today.

上記文中のEtchemendyさんの発言‘those big shiny Oracle towers on Highway 101’とは、Stanfordの近くのHighway 101のそばから見えるOracle社のビル群だか何かだと思われます。つまりコンピュータ産業の象徴として言及されているものと思われます。