Logic became a mathematical science in the decades around 1900; that same period saw a wild proliferation of systems for representing the newly mathematical logic on paper. The fertile period for notational invention that began with English mathematician George Boole’s algebraic methods in the mid nineteenth century reached a kind of apogee in interwar Poland, where logicians of the Lwów–Warsaw School effectively dissolved the line between notation and its object. Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956), one of the school’s leading figures, introduced a system of notation without punctuation or spacing. Every logical statement was represented by a single uninterrupted string of capital and lowercase Latin and Greek letters. Shorn of parentheses and other such outward flourishes, a statement’s length became a visually prominent and conceptually interesting attribute. Soon Łukasiewicz and his colleagues began working to build logical systems in as few letters as possible, seeing notational economy not merely as a stylistic virtue but as an object of scientific inquiry in itself. Their pursuit of brevity illustrates how a form of writing can shape and even reciprocally constitute the research programme that spawned it.
