Hao Wang (academic)
Hao Wang (王 浩Chinese, Pinyin Wáng Hào; born May 20, 1921 in Jinan, Shandong Province, China; † 13 May 1995 New York City ) was a Chinese- American logician, mathematician and philosopher. He worked among others named after him Wang tiling.
Life and work
Hao Wang studied in China at the National University of the Southwest, where in 1943 he earned his bachelor 's degree. In 1945 he received his master's degree in philosophy at Tsinghua University and then went to the USA where he studied logic at Harvard University. In 1948, he was there his doctorate at Willard Van Orman Quine (An Economic Ontology for Classical Arithmetic ) and was also an assistant professor in philosophy and 1951 Junior Fellow. 1950/51 he was with Paul Bernays in Zurich, 1953/54, at the Burroughs Corporation and in 1956 John Locke Lecturer at Oxford University. In 1961 he was Gordon McKay Professor of Mathematical Logic at Harvard and was 1967-1991 Professor and Head of the Research Group for Mathematical Logic at the Rockefeller University in New York. In 1991 he retired, but remained at the university.
Wang made many contributions to mathematical logic. At IBM, he developed 1960 computer programs to derive sets of propositional and predicate logic, as formulated in the Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. He invented 1961, the Wang tilings which, after Wang predictability models equivalent to Turing machines. They also provided in 1966 the first examples of aperiodic tilings (Robert Berger), whose best-known examples are known as quasicrystals.
Wang also dealt with the philosophical work of Kurt Gödel, about which he wrote several articles and books.
In 1985 he became honorary professor of Beijing University and Qinghua University in 1986.
His doctoral include Stephen Cook and Robert Berger.
Writings
- A formal system for logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Volume 15, 1950, pp. 25-32
- Robert McNaughton: Les systèmes de la théorie axiomatiques of ensembles. Gauthier -Villars, 1953.
- A Survey of Mathematical Logic. North Holland 1963, as Logic, Computers and Sets. Chelsea 1970 ( with reprints of some of his articles ).
- Games, Logic and Computer. Scientific American November 1965.
- From Mathematics to Philosophy. Routledge 1974.
- Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice to What We Know. MIT Press 1985.
- Reflections on Kurt Godel. MIT Press 1987.
- Computation, Logic, Philosophy - A Collection of Essays. Kluwer 1990.
- A Logical Journey: from Gödel to Philosophy. MIT Press 1996.
- Toward Mechanical Mathematics. IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 4, 1962, p.2.
- Proving the theorem by Pattern Recognition. Part 1, ACM Journal, Vol.3, 1960, S.220, Part 2, Bell System Technical Journal Vol 40, 1961, p.1.