Pavel Tichý
is dead

On Wednesday, October 26, Pavel Tichý, the founder of transparent intensional logic, committed suicide in Dunedin, New Zealand. No concrete motives for his doing that are known. He was preparing his moving to Czech Republic where he was to become the head of the Department of Logic on Philosophical Faculty (Charles University, Prague). Several days before this death he sent an e-mail message to Prague; it was a rather optimistic message, implying that he had been looking forward to his return home. Some sudden outburst of a kind of depression must have been guilty. Yet nobody will ever guess what happened to his excellent mind.

The irrationality of his deed is conspicuous: he was just hard working on the realization of a grandiose project consisting in creating a system of rules which would make it possible to generate, for English, ordered pairs (E,M), where E would be any (English) expression, and M would be its meaning. This project required much work and money; Pavel planned to gain a grant and some collaborators to finish this work in Prague. You would never expect that a man of his character, fully dedicated to his work and fully convinced - rightly, I would say, - that his conception is better than the other ones, would kill himself.

No details are known up to now. Our Journal will publish more about Pavel in some of the following issues. We will publish his curriculum, as well as the bibliography of his work, commentaries written by those who were personally acquainted with Pavel, etc.

Anyway, his theory deserves to be developed and applied. A task which is by now far more difficult but not impossible to perform.

Pavel Materna