George Boole Jnr was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought (1854), which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic, essential to computer programming, is credited with helping to lay the foundations for the Information Age.
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as an undergraduate, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. He was also influential in persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret intellectual society, from 1921.
John Venn, FRS, FSA was an English mathematician, logician and philosopher noted for introducing Venn diagrams, which are used in logic, set theory, probability, statistics, and computer science. In 1866, Venn published The Logic of Chance, a groundbreaking book which espoused the frequency theory of probability, arguing that probability should be determined by how often something is forecast to occur as opposed to "educated" assumptions. Venn then further developed George Boole's theories in the 1881 work Symbolic Logic, where he highlighted what would become known as Venn diagrams.
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada. It awards a scholarship and cash prizes ranging from $250 to $2,500 for the top students and $5,000 to $25,000 for the top schools, plus one of the top five individual scorers is awarded a scholarship of up to $12,000 plus tuition at Harvard University, the top 100 individual scorers have their names mentioned in the American Mathematical Monthly, and the names and addresses of the top 500 contestants are mailed to all participating institutions. It is widely considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the world, and its difficulty is such that the median score is often zero or one despite being primarily attempted by students specializing in mathematics.
In classical logic, propositions are typically unambiguously considered as being true or false. For instance, the proposition one is both equal and not equal to itself is regarded as simply false, being contrary to the Law of Noncontradiction; while the proposition one is equal to one is regarded as simply true, by the Law of Identity. However, some mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers have been attracted to the idea that a proposition might be more or less true, rather than wholly true or wholly false. Consider My coffee is hot.
George Whitelaw Mackey was an American mathematician known for his contributions to quantum logic, representation theory, and noncommutative geometry.
Noam David Elkies is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. At age 26, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard. He is also a pianist, chess national master, and chess composer.
In philosophy and the social sciences, social software is an interdisciplinary research program that borrows mathematical tools and techniques from game theory and computer science in order to analyze and design social procedures. The goals of research in this field are modeling social situations, developing theories of correctness, and designing social procedures.
Formal epistemology uses formal methods from decision theory, logic, probability theory and computability theory to model and reason about issues of epistemological interest. Work in this area spans several academic fields, including philosophy, computer science, economics, and statistics. The focus of formal epistemology has tended to differ somewhat from that of traditional epistemology, with topics like uncertainty, induction, and belief revision garnering more attention than the analysis of knowledge, skepticism, and issues with justification. Formal Epistemology extenuates into Formal Language Theory.
Andreas Raphael Blass is a mathematician, currently a professor at the University of Michigan. He works in mathematical logic, particularly set theory, and theoretical computer science.
Bjorn Mikhail Poonen is a mathematician, four-time Putnam Competition winner, and a Distinguished Professor in Science in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is primarily in arithmetic geometry, but he has occasionally published in other subjects such as probability and computer science. He has edited two books.
Stefan Andrus Burr is a mathematician and computer scientist, specializing in graph theory and number theory, particularly Ramsey theory. He is a retired professor of Computer Science at The City College of New York.
Maxwell Alexander Rosenlicht was an American mathematician known for works in algebraic geometry, algebraic groups, and differential algebra.
Sergei Nikolaevich Artemov is a Russian-American researcher in logic and its applications. He currently holds the title of Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he is the founder and head of its research laboratory for logic and computation. His research interests include proof theory and logic in computer science, optimal control and hybrid systems, automated deduction and verification, epistemology, and epistemic game theory. He is best known for his invention of logics of proofs and justifications.
Joseph Lipman is a Canadian-American mathematician, working in algebraic geometry.
Joel David Hamkins is an American mathematician and philosopher who is the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Logic at the University of Notre Dame. He has made contributions in mathematical and philosophical logic, set theory and philosophy of set theory, in computability theory, and in group theory.
Ana Caraiani is a Romanian-American mathematician, who is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Hausdorff Chair at the University of Bonn. Her research interests include algebraic number theory and the Langlands program.
Greta Cvetanova Panova is a Bulgarian-American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics and Gabilan Distinguished Professor in Science and Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her research interests include combinatorics, probability and theoretical computer science.
Lenore D. Zuck is an Israeli-American computer scientist whose research involves formal methods in software engineering, as well as information privacy. She is a research professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Chicago.
