Moses Schönfinkel
Russian logician and mathematician (1888–1942)
Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel (Russian: Моисей Эльевич Шейнфинкель, romanized: Moisei El'evich Sheinfinkel; 29 September 1888 – 1942 (1943)) was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic.
Life
Moses Schönfinkel was born on (1888-09-29)29 September 1888 in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipro, Ukraine) to a Jewish family. His father was Ilya Girshevich Schönfinkel, a merchant of first guild, who was in the grocery trade; his mother, Maria “Masha” Gertsovna Schönfinkel (née Lurie), came from the prominent Lurie family. Moses had siblings named Deborah, Natan, Israel and Grigoriy. Schönfinkel attended Novorossiysk University of Odessa, studying mathematics under Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii (1859–1929), who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics. From 1914 to 1924, Schönfinkel was a member of David Hilbert's group at the University of Göttingen in Germany. On 7 December 1920 he delivered a talk entitled Elemente der Logik ("Elements of Logic") to the group where he outlined the concept of combinatory logic. Heinrich Behmann, a member of Hilbert's group, later revised the text and published it in 1924. In 1928, Schönfinkel had one other paper published, on special cases of the decision problem (Entscheidungsproblem), which was prepared by Paul Bernays.
After he left Göttingen, Schönfinkel returned to Moscow.
“Moses Schönfinkel” enters the record as russian logician and mathematician (1888–1942). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Moses, Schönfinkel and Russian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q45113. VIAF identifies the subject as 315940059. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1888, 1942, 1943 and 1859.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moses Schönfinkel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.