Solomon Feferman

Solomon Feferman ( born December 13, 1928 in New York City ) is an American mathematician who deals with mathematical logic and philosophy of mathematics.

Life and work

Feferman studied at Caltech (Bachelor 1948 ) Mathematics, was two years 1953 and 1955 in the U.S. Army as compulsory military service and received his PhD in 1957 with Alfred Tarski at the University of California, Berkeley (Formal consistency proofs and Interpretability of Theories ). From 1956 he was at Stanford University, first as an instructor, in 1958 as assistant professor of mathematics and philosophy, starting in 1962 as an associate professor and from 1968 as a professor. From 2004 he is a professor emeritus. He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University, the University of Paris, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967 /68), the University of Amsterdam, the University of Rome, ETH Zurich, Stanford University, the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm.

Feferman deals with mathematical logic ( proof theory, computability theory ), foundations of mathematics, philosophy of mathematics and history of logic. He was in the 1960s, first by Paul Cohen, who applied the forcing method for independence proofs in set theory ( and was often consulted by Cohen, as this forcing his way into Stanford developed ).

Feferman led the mid-1960s independently by Kurt Schütte a Feferman -Schütte ordinal that in the proof theory.

His lecture Does mathematics need new axioms? at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society in 1997 was the occasion of a debate.

1972/73 and 1986/87 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1990 he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 he was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize. In 2006 he held the Tarski Lectures at Berkeley. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Nice ( Ordinals and functionals in proof theory ). He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

1982 to 2003 he was editor of the Collected Works of Kurt Gödel. He also edited the works of Julia Robinson and wrote a biography of Alfred Tarski, together with his wife, Anita Burdman Feferman writer (* 1927), for whose biography of Jean Van Heijenoort he also wrote an appendix. Both knew this person.

His PhD is one of Jon Barwise.