Robin Gandy
Robin Oliver Gandy (born September 22, 1919 in Rotherfield Peppard , Oxfordshire , † November 20, 1995 in Oxford ) was a British logician .
Gandy started before World War II to study mathematics and philosophy at King's College of Cambridge University , where he at Alan Turing received his doctorate in 1952 ( On axiomatic system in mathematics and theories in physics ), with whom he worked and with whom he friends was. From 1940 onwards (he had taken the first part of the Tripos exams, the third part he made up after the war), his studies were interrupted for six years during the Second World War, where he initially worked as a radio and radar expert. He knew Turing better from the time during the war (1944 in Hanslope Park), when he worked with him on voice encryption methods (a machine with the code name Delilah chosen by Gandy ). 1950 to 1956 he was a lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Leicester and 1956 to 1961 in the same function at the University of Leeds .
In 1961 Max Newman , who had already brought Turing there, brought him as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester , where he became a reader in 1964 and a professor in 1967, teaching the logic and philosophy of mathematics. 1966/67 he was an associate professor at Stanford University and 1968 at UCLA .
In 1969 he moved to Oxford to Wolfson College as a reader , where one of the buildings is named after him today. Before that, he organized the ASL European meeting in Manchester in 1969 . At Oxford he had over 30 PhD students. In 1986 he retired there.
He was mainly concerned with recursion theory and effective descriptive set theory. A generalization of Turing machines is named after him.
From 1970 to 1973 he served on the Council of the Association for Symbolic Logic . He was a co-founder (with John Shepherdson) and first President of the British Logic Colloquium. Gandy was also the heir to Turing's written estate. He was involved in the publication of his works and was still working on the edition of Turing's On computable numbers shortly before his death .
In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Recursive functionals of type 3 and 4 ).
One of Gandy's graduate students, John Sharkey , later became a member of the House of Lords and in 2013 proposed a rehabilitation proposal for Alan Turing. This was in 1953 because of his homosexuality sentenced to prison and been forced psychiatric treatment, after which he shortly afterwards suicide committed.
literature
- Yiannis N. Moschovakis , Mike Yates, Obituary, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 2, 1996, p. 121
Web links
- Portrait of the Turing biographer Andrew Hodges von Gandy with interview excerpts
- Obituary in The Independent 1995 by Mike Yates
- Literature by and about Robin Gandy in the WorldCat bibliographic database
Individual evidence
- ↑ Werner Pluta: Alan Turing. Late rehabilitation for the computer pioneer. on golem.de from July 23, 2013, accessed on July 23, 2013
- ↑ Nicholas Watt: Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing to be given posthumous pardon on guardian.co.uk July 19, 2013, accessed July 23, 2013
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gandy, Robin |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gandy, Robin Oliver |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British logician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 22, 1919 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rotherfield Peppard |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 20, 1995 |
| Place of death | Oxford |