Narrator: Pavel Pudlák
Interviewer: Tomáš W. Pavlíček
Location: Praha
Datum: 03. 04. 2023
Prof. RNDr. Pavel Pudlák, DrSc. (born 1952), reflected on his educational practices and habits during his studies at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. Even then, his primary interest was in mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. Pudlák’s interest led him to Petr Hájek, a researcher at the Mathematical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Hájek first supervised Pudlák’s diploma thesis and later his doctoral thesis.
In an interview, he described how he collaborated with Petr Hájek and how his regular seminars on logic and less formal winter workshops at the Academy of Sciences’ holiday home in the Jizera Mountains were organised. These workshops were attended by scientists from Poland and the West.
Students of logic within Pudlák’s circle were aware of the philosophical associations within mathematical science, but they sought more stimulating material than the mandatory course in Marxism-Leninism. This led them to invite philosophy graduate and participant in the theoretical cybernetics course, Václav Benda, to give lectures on Martin Heidegger.
Pavel Pudlák’s interest increasingly shifted towards theoretical informatics and computational complexity theory. He gained an admirable international reputation, publishing extensively with foreign scientists, including Czech and Polish exiles, such as his former classmate, Vojtěch Rödl, and Jan Mycielski, who was originally from Wrocław.