Computability

B. Jack Copeland, Carl J. Posy, Oron Shagrir

Published by The MIT Press

Copeland, B. Jack, et al.

Computability: Turing, Gödel, Church, and Beyond.
The MIT Press, 2013.
Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/39754.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/39754

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About the Authors

Scott Aaronson is associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science

at MIT, affiliated with CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory. His research interests center around the limitations of quantum com-
puters, and computational complexity theory more generally. Aaronson is the recipi-
ent of the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation, 2012.
Dorit Aharonov is professor of computer science and engineering at The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Israel. She studies quantum information processes, includ-
ing quantum algorithms, quantum cryptography, and quantum computational com-
plexity. Her general objective is to better understand fundamental aspects of
quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, many-body quantum physics, and the
transition from quantum to classical, by using a computational perspective. In 2005
Aharonov was profiled by the journal Nature as one of four “young theorists ... who
are making waves in their chosen fields,” and in the following year, she received the
Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research.
B. Jack Copeland is professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New
Zealand, and director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. His books
include Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford University Press), Alan
Turing’s Electronic Brain (Oxford University Press), The Essential Turing (Oxford
University Press), Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Comput-
ers (Oxford University Press), Logic and Reality (Oxford University Press), and
Artificial Intelligence (Blackwell); and he has published more than 100 articles on
the philosophy and history of computing, and on mathematical and philosophical
logic. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Martin Davis is a pioneer of computability theory and a renowned mathematical
logician. He has been on the faculty of the Courant Institute, New York University,
since 1965 and was one of the founding members of the computer science depart-
ment at NYU. A student of Emil Post and Alonzo Church, Davis is known for his
ground-breaking work in automated deduction and for his contributions to the
solution of Hilbert’s tenth problem, for which he was awarded the Chauvenet and
Lester R. Ford Prizes by the Mathematical Association of America and the Leroy
P. Steele Prize by the American Mathematical Society. Among his many books are
Computability and Unsolvability (McGraw-Hill, reprinted Dover), which has been
352 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

writing extensively on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of math-

ematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. His
books include Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press), Representation and
Reality (MIT Press), Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press), Prag-
matism: An Open Question (Blackwell), The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World
(Columbia University Press), Realism with a Human Face (Harvard University
Press), Words and Life (Harvard University Press), The Collapse of the Fact/Value
Dichotomy (Harvard University Press), Ethics Without Ontology (Harvard Univer-
sity Press), and Philosophy in an Age of Science (Harvard University Press). Putnam
is a past president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division),
the Philosophy of Science Association, and the Association for Symbolic Logic. He
is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophi-
cal Society, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and the French Acad-
emie des Sciences Politiques et Morales, and holds a number of honorary degrees.
In 2010 Putnam received the Prometheus Prize of the American Philosophical
Association, and in 2011 he was awarded with the Rolf Schock Prize in
Philosophy.
Oron Shagrir is professor of philosophy and former chair of the cognitive science
department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the vice rector
of the Hebrew University. His work focuses on the philosophy and history of com-
puting and on the conceptual foundations of cognitive science and computational
neuroscience. He has published numerous articles in philosophy and computer
science journals, including Mind, Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Phi-
losophy of Science, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese, Philo-
sophical Studies, Minds and Machines, and Theoretical Computer Science.
Stewart Shapiro is O’Donnell professor of philosophy at Ohio State University and
professor of philosophy at St. Andrew’s University. His books include Foundations
without Foundationalism: A Case for Second-Order Logic (Oxford University Press),
Thinking about Mathematics (Oxford University Press), Philosophy of Mathematics:
Structure and Ontology (Oxford University Press), and Vagueness in Context (Oxford
University Press). He is the editor of the recently released Oxford Handbook of the
Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic and author of many articles on the history
and philosophy of mathematics.
Wilfried Sieg is Patrick Suppes professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He joined Carnegie
Mellon’s faculty in 1985 as a founding member of the University’s philosophy
department and served as its Head from 1994 to 2005. He is internationally known
for his mathematical work in proof and computation theory, historical work on
modern logic and mathematics, and philosophical essays on the nature of mathemat-
ics. A collection of essays joining the three aspects of his research was published
under the title Hilbert’s Programs and Beyond (Oxford University Press). As Co-
Director of LSEC (Carnegie Mellon’s Laboratory of Symbolic and Educational
Computing) he has pursued his AProS Project pioneering strategic automated
search for natural deduction proofs in logic and elementary set theory; this work is
used in interactive, fully web-based logic courses Sieg has developed.
354 About the Authors

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).