Polish notation
nounEtymology After the nationality of the logician Jan Łukasiewicz
1
Arithmetic, Human sciences, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy, Sciences A notation for arithmetic (and logical) formulae in which operations (respectively, quantifiers and operands) are written immediately before their operands, used to avoid the need for parentheses; for example, 3 * (4 + 7) is written as * 3 + 4 7 and A AND B is written as AND A B.
- In Polish Notation, the connectives are placed before the wffs. The virtue of this sentence is that its grammar is simpler, for it has no need for parentheses. Sider’s examples: (P ∧ Q) → R and P ∧ (Q → R) become → ∧PQR and ∧P → QR. If you actually look at a text in this tradition, you’ll find something slightly different. “C” stands for “consequence”, i.e., implication (→) and “N” for negation (∼). So,consider the following from Tarski and Łukasiewicz’s Investigations into the Sentential Calculus. The claim there is that there are three axioms: ‘CCpqCCqrCpr’ ‘CCNppp’ ‘CpCNpq’2009, Brandon C. Look, “Symbolic Logic II, Lecture 6”, in www.uky.edu/~look, archived from the original on 09 Nov 2011:
- Synonyms
- prefix notation
- Related terms
- infix notation, postfix notation, reverse Polish notation