Dana Scott
Dana Stewart Scott ( born October 11, 1932 in Berkeley ) is an American mathematician, logician, computer scientist and philosopher who made significant contributions to automata theory, model theory, axiomatic set theory and semantics of programming languages has done.
Life and work
Scott is the only child of two agents who were divorced in 1938. He studied from 1950 to 1954 Bachelor's degree in Mathematics Berkeley ( among others, Alfred Tarski ) and received his doctorate in 1958 Alonzo Church in Princeton on Convergent sequences of complete theories. 1959, during a post-doc at the University of Chicago, he published with Michael O. Rabin, Finite automata and Their decision problems ( introduction of non-deterministic automata), the results of a collaboration of the two during a summer job in 1957 at the Thomas J. Watson research Center of IBM emerged, and for the two 1976, the Turing Award was presented.
1958 to 1960 he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago. In 1960 he became an assistant professor at Berkeley, where he among other things with modal logic employed ( book died in 1966 John Lemmon, An introduction to modal logic, 1977). 1963 to 1967 he was assistant professor and then to 1969, professor of mathematics and logic at Stanford University. In 1968/69 he was a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, 1969 to 1972 professor of philosophy and mathematics at Princeton. 1972 to 1981 he was professor of mathematical logic at Oxford, where he collaborated with Christopher Strachey about the semantics of programming languages worked ( Denotational Semantics, justification of the "Domain Theory", for this work he received the 1990 Harold Pender Award and the 1997 Rolf Schock prize ). The cooperation between the two began during a stay in Oxford 1969. 1981 until his retirement in 2003 he was a professor of computer science, mathematical logic and philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he set up the Faculty of Philosophy with Herbert Simon from 1985 helped. 1992/93 he was a visiting professor at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, 2001 at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm, and in 2003 a visiting scientist from the Alexander von Humboldt -Stiftung in Munich. Among his 50 Ph.D. students include Kenneth Kunen and Angus Macintyre.
In 1967, he led ( a suggestion by Robert Solovay, following which it at the same time as well as Petr Vopěnka independently did) Boolean -valued models, which he ( proved in 1963 by Paul Cohen ) to a new proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis used (A proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis, Mathematical Systems Theory Vol 1, 1967, pp. 89-111 ). For this he received the 1972 Leroy P. Steele Prize.
In 1974 he published a for Zermelo -Fraenkel system alternative axiom system of set theory (Scott cal system of axioms ).
In addition, he also worked on category theory and topology.
Scott was 1963-1965 Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and 1978/79 as a Guggenheim Fellow Visiting Scientist at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). In 2003 he was a visiting scientist at the Humboldt - Stiftung in Munich. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Utrecht, Edinburgh, Ljubljana and the TH Darmstadt (1995). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Academy, the Finnish since 1972 and the New York Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. He is a Fellow of the ACM. In 2001 he received the Bolzano Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 1989 he held the first Tarski Lectures at Berkeley, 1991, the second Gödel Lecture. In 2007 he received the EATCS Award. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Scott is co-founder of the group - for Mathematical Logic, which deals with the publication of the book series Perspectives in Mathematical Logic.
He is married to the pianist Irene Schreier, who also teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.