John W. Dawson, Jr

John William Dawson Junior ( born February 4, 1944 in Wichita ) is an American mathematical logician and historian of mathematics.

Dawson went to Wichita to school and studied from 1962 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics with a bachelor's degree in 1966 and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a doctorate in David Kueker ( and AR Blass ) 1972 ( Definability of Ordinals in the rank - Hierarchy of Set Theory). He is a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

He cataloged the estate of Kurt Gödel at the Institute for Advanced Study to 1984 and wrote a biography of Gödel, considered the standard work.

He was co-editor of the journal History and Philosophy of Logic.

Writings

He is co-editor of the Collected Works of Kurt Gödel, Oxford University Press, five volumes, 1986-2003, with Solomon Feferman, Warren Goldfarb, Stephen Kleene, Gregory H. Moore, Charles Parsons, Wilfried Sieg, Robert M. Solovay, Jean van Heijenoort.

• Kurt Gödel. Life and Work, Springer Verlag 1999, new edition as: Logical dilemmas. Kurt Godel - Life and Work, Springer Verlag 2007 English original: Logical dilemmas: the life and work of Kurt Gödel, AK Peters, translated into Italian and Chinese in 1997
• Review by Martin Davis, Notices AMS 2001, No.8, pdf