Jeff Paris

Jeffrey Bruce Paris ( b. 1944 ) is a British mathematician who deals with mathematical logic. He is a professor at the University of Manchester, where he earned his doctorate under Robin Gandy 1969 ( Boolean extensions and large cardinals ).

Life and work

He became known by the Paris - Harrington theorem from 1977 with Leo Harrington, in which the Nichtbeweisbarkeit a true set of elementary arithmetic was shown from the Peano axioms of arithmetic for the first time. The existence of such true, but not provable sentences was known by the incompleteness theorem of Gödel generally for ( sufficiently rich ) formal systems, but Paris and Harrington delivered the first time an elementary example, which came from the Ramsey theory. In 1982, he was with Laurie Kirby, that the set of Goodstein not provable by methods of Peano arithmetic (Theorem of Kirby and Paris).

In 1983 he was awarded the Whitehead Prize. He was elected to the British Academy in 1999.

Writings

• The uncertain reasoner 's companion: a mathematical perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-521-46089-1