Talk:Jean van Heijenoort

revision

I, the Concerned Cynic, chanced upon this article in December 2005 and promptly revised it extensively. I am privileged to own a copy of Feferman's biography. VH's personal life was a stickier wicket than I let on. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.36.179.65 (talk) 14:52, 8 December 2005

Van vs van

The body text of the article, as well as the Math Genealogogy page, capitalize the Van. I have thus, as was done for Townes Van Zandt, capitalized the V in the page title, and alphabetized the sort keys under Van Heijenoort. grendel|khan 13:22, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

His name is Jean van Heijenoort, not Van Heijenoort. See the frontice-page of his Source book (Harvard University Press), for instance. I'm not sure what the English-language rule is about lowercase v when "van Heijenoort" starts a sentence, although my gut says you don't fiddle with a man's name, rules or no rules. But I'm going to fix the title. BillWvbailey (talk) 14:41, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

The current ratio is about 15,000 wikipedia articles with titles like John von Neumann with a lowercase "v", and 4,000 with titles like "Yuri Van Gelder" with an uppercase "V". Most (all?) style guides capitalize the "V" when it starts a sentence, just as the capitalize an other noun when it starts a sentence, but that is a different issue because we have "Jean" before "van" in the title here.

The math genealogy project isn't a source for canonical spellings, and the body text of this article does not capitalize the 'v" when it doesn't start a sentence. A scan through google books shows many, many books that don't capitalize the "v". So I agree with Wvbailey and I'm going to move the article to the other capitalization. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:22, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

jean van h

hey wasts up my name is jean van i was born yesterday in the hospital u was born and i luv u —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 170.235.222.10 (talk) 13:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC).

Book about JVH's work

reviewed here. Looks interesting. Maybe something from the review can be worked into the article. The book should also be referenced. Modern Logic 2/3 (1992) also has a lot of material. [1] Actually more stuff is easy to find, so the article can be expanded some. I don't know if I'll attempt this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.241.238.233 (talk) 03:58, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

straitened

What does the word mean in "Van Heijenoort came of age in straitened family circumstances"? I think it should be replaced, but not knowing what the intention is... Jd2718 (talk) 17:11, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

"straitened circumstances" means that they didn't have much money. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 17:56, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Jd2718 will find a definition here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/straitened_circumstances. 109.158.118.141 (talk) 16:47, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

Minor factual error

The anthology 'From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931' does not end with Gödel's paper, it ends with Herbrand's 'On the consistency of arithmetic'. 109.158.118.141 (talk) 16:46, 18 July 2020 (UTC)