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Heinrich Behmann's Contributions to Second-Order Quantifier Elimination from the View of Computational Logic
For relational monadic formulas (the L\"owenheim class) second-order
quantifier elimination, which is closely related to computation of uniform
interpolants, projection and forgetting - operations that currently receive
much attention in knowledge processing - always succeeds. The decidability
proof for this class by Heinrich Behmann from 1922 explicitly proceeds by
elimination with equivalence preserving formula rewriting. Here we reconstruct
the results from Behmann's publication in detail and discuss related issues
that are relevant in the context of modern approaches to second-order
quantifier elimination in computational logic. In addition, an extensive
documentation of the letters and manuscripts in Behmann's bequest that concern
second-order quantifier elimination is given, including a commented register
and English abstracts of the German sources with focus on technical material.
In the late 1920s Behmann attempted to develop an elimination-based decision
method for formulas with predicates whose arity is larger than one. His
manuscripts and the correspondence with Wilhelm Ackermann show technical
aspects that are still of interest today and give insight into the genesis of
Ackermann's landmark paper "Untersuchungen \"uber das Eliminationsproblem der
mathematischen Logik" from 1935, which laid the foundation of the two
prevailing modern approaches to second-order quantifier elimination