Robert M. Solovay

Robert Martin Solovay ( born 1938 in Brooklyn ) is an American mathematician who is engaged in axiomatic set theory.

Solovay doctorate in 1964 at the University of Chicago with Saunders MacLane (A Functorial form of the Differentiable Riemann -Roch theorem) and then was 1964/65 as a post- doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was for many years a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Solovay made ​​important contributions to axiomatic set theory. For example, he showed in 1970 that the set Each set of real numbers is Lebesgue measurable is consistent with the Zermelo -Fraenkel set theory without the axiom of choice. ( This means they need the axiom of choice was shown in Vitalis proof of unsolvability of Maßproblems ).

Solovay played a key role in the expansion and simplification of forcing method by Paul Cohen shortly after its launch in 1963. In 1967, he led independently by Dana Scott a Boolean -valued models of set theory, which allowed a simplification of the proof of Cohen on the independence of the continuum hypothesis.

In 1971, he was with Stanley Tennenbaum the independence of the Suslin hypothesis of the Zermelo -Fraenkel axioms ..

In 1975, he was with Theodore Baker and Robert Gill, that relativizing proof techniques in the P- NP problem can not be successful.

His doctoral counts W. Hugh Woodin.

In 2003 he received the Paris Kanellakis Award.