Computability. Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond - 99.00
Computability. Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond - 99.00
Computability. Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond - 99.00
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About the Authors
called “one of the few real classics in computer science”; The Undecidable: Unsolv-
able Problems and Computable Functions (Raven, reprinted Dover), and The Uni-
versal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (CRC Press).
Solomon Feferman is Patrick Suppes professor of humanities and sciences, emeritus,
and professor of mathematics and philosophy, emeritus, at Stanford University; he
is a former chair of the department of mathematics at Stanford. Feferman is noted
for his many contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of mathemat-
ics. He was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2003 for his
work on the arithmetization of metamathematics, ordinal logics (substantially
extending Turing’s doctoral work), and predicative analysis. He is a past president
of the Association for Symbolic Logic and is a Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences. Feferman is author of In the Light of Logic (Oxford University
Press), editor-in-chief of the five-volume Kurt Gödel: Collected Works (Oxford Uni-
versity Press), co-author with Anita Burdman Feferman of Alfred Tarski: Life and
Logic (Cambridge University Press), and co-editor with Jon Barwise of Model-
Theoretic Logics (Springer-Verlag). In tribute to him is the volume edited by
W. Sieg, R. Sommer and C. Talcott, Reflections on the Foundations of Mathematics:
Essays in Honor of Solomon Feferman (Association for Symbolic Logic).
Saul A. Kripke is distinguished professor of philosophy and computer science at
CUNY, Graduate Center, and McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Prince-
ton University. While a high school student in Nebraska, he wrote a series of papers
that transformed modal and intuitionistic logic and remain canonical works in the
field. He has made other significant technical contributions to mathematical logic.
During the 60s and 70s, Kripke presented his revolutionary account of reference in
lectures that were transcribed and eventually published as his classic Naming and
Necessity (Blackwell, 1980; first published in 1972 as an article). Another series of
lectures was transcribed and published in 1982 as his highly influential Wittgenstein
on Rules and Private Language (Blackwell). In 2011 he published his first collection
of papers, Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers, Vol. 1. In 2001 he won the
Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. He has received honorary degrees from
several institutions and has been a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard,
John Locke Lecturer at Oxford University, the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at
Cornell University, professor at Rockefeller University, and visiting professor at
several institutions, including the Hebrew University.
Carl J. Posy is professor of philosophy and member of the Center for the Study of
Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is Chairman of the academic
committee of the Logic, Language and Cognition Center at the Hebrew University.
He is well known for his publications on mathematical intuitionism and constructive
mathematics, and his work on the philosophy of mathematics and its history. He is
editor of Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics: Modern Essays (Kluwer), and his many
publications on intuitionism include most recently “Intuitionism and Philosophy”
in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Mathematics.
Hilary Putnam is Cogan university professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard
University. He has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s,
About the Authors 353
Robert Irving Soare is the Paul Snowden Russell distinguished service professor of
mathematics and computer science at the University of Chicago, where he was the
founding chairman of the department of computer science. Soare is the author of
two books, Recursively Enumerable Sets and Degrees: A Study of Computable Func-
tions and Computably Enumerable Sets (Springer), and Computability Theory and
Applications (Springer). He is also the author of papers in leading journals such as
The Annals of Mathematics, The Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA, and of numerous papers
on Turing and the concept of computability. Soare has been an invited speaker at
the International Congress of Mathematicians and several times at the International
Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science.
Umesh V. Vazirani is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the
Berkeley Quantum Computation Center. He is one of the founders of the field of
quantum computing. His 1993 paper with his student Ethan Bernstein on quantum
complexity theory gave the first formal evidence that quantum Turing machines
violate the extended Church-Turing thesis, and paved the way for Shor’s quantum
algorithm for factoring integers. In 2005 Vazirani was made a fellow of the Associa-
tion for Computing Machinery for “contributions to theoretical computer science
and quantum computation.” He is the author of An Introduction to Computational
Learning Theory (with Michael Kearns; MIT Press), and Algorithms (with Sanjoy
Dasgupta and Christos Papadimitriou; McGraw Hill).