Kleene

Stephen Cole Kleene

Born: 5 Jan 1909 in Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Died: 25 Jan 1994 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA

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Kleene studied for his first degree at Amherst College. He went on to receive a doctorate from Princeton University in 1934, then taught at Princeton until he joined the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1935. He became a full professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1948 and remained on the staff there until he retired in 1979.

Kleene's research was on the theory of algorithms and recursive functions. He developed the field of recursion theory with Church, Gödel, Turing and others. He contributed to mathematical Intuitionism which had been founded by Brouwer.

His work on recursion theory helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. By providing methods of determining which problems are soluble, Kleene's work led to the study of which functions can be computed.

His best known books are Introduction to Metamathematics (1952) and Mathematical Logic (1967).

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. J E Keisler, Stephen Cole Kleene 1909-1994, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 41 (1994), 792-793.
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JOC/EFR February 1996