Kuratowski, K.; Mostowski, A. Set Theory. Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, 1967. First English edition

Kuratowski, K.; Mostowski, A. Set Theory / translated from the Polish "Teoria mnogości" (PWN, 1966, series "Monografie Matematyczne") by M. Mączyński ; series Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics ; editors A. Heyting, A. Mostowski, A. Robinson, P. Suppes.
Warsaw : PWN - Polish Scientific Publishers ; Amsterdam : North-Holland Publishing Company, 1967. xi, 417 pp. Enlarged format.
Hardcover (black cloth, gilt-stamped spine), with dust jacket. First English edition. Special printing for distribution within the socialist countries, per the notice on the copyright page.
Boards good: light rubbing at edges and corners. Text block good: clean, complete, binding firm. Dust jacket fair: substantial loss to the lower front panel, tears and creasing along edges and spine.

The first English edition of one of the definitive twentieth-century treatments of set theory, by two of the most eminent figures of the Warsaw School of Mathematics. Kazimierz Kuratowski (1896-1980), whose definition of the ordered pair remains the standard construction in axiomatic set theory and whose name attaches to the Kuratowski closure axioms and the Kuratowski-Zorn lemma, was a founder of the Polish topological tradition and long-serving director of the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Andrzej Mostowski (1913-1975), a student of Tarski and one of the architects of modern model theory, contributed the Mostowski collapse and foundational work on the independence of the axiom of choice; he served simultaneously on the editorial board of the North-Holland "Studies in Logic" series in which this volume appeared. Translated from the 1966 Polish "Teoria mnogości" in the Monografie Matematyczne series, the book proceeds from the algebra of sets, Boolean algebras, and lattices through the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms, relations and functions, cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, the well-ordering theorem and Zorn's maximal principle, to Borel and projective sets and the elements of descriptive set theory, treating throughout the Suslin problem, inaccessible cardinals, Ramsey's theorem, and the Cantor-Bendixson and Cantor-Bernstein theorems. The volume was extensively revised and enlarged for the 1976 second edition; this first English printing preserves the original text as it entered international circulation, and its restricted socialist-bloc imprint documents the parallel distribution networks through which Polish mathematical scholarship reached readers east of the Iron Curtain.