Stephen G. Simpson

Stephen George Simpson (born September 8, 1945 ) is an American mathematical logician and mathematician.

Simpson studied from 1962 to 1966 at Lehigh University , where he made his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics. He then studied from 1966 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and 1969/70 at the University of Wisconsin ). In 1971 he received his doctorate from MIT with Gerald E. Sacks ( Admissible ordinals and recursion theory ). 1971/72 he was Gibbs Instructor at Yale University and 1972 to 1974 lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and 1974/75 at Oxford University . In 1975 he became an Assistant Professor, 1977 Associate Professor and 1980 Professor at Pennsylvania State University . He was visiting professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (1982/83), the University of Paris (1981), the University of Chicago (1978), Stanford University (1987), the University of Illinois and the University of Tennessee , among others .

In addition to mathematical logic, where he dealt with reverse mathematics , the theory of Turing degrees (Degrees of unsolvability) in recursion theory and complexity theory, Simpson also deals with combinatorics and the philosophy of mathematics, in which he uses the concept of actual infinity in favor of potentials Rejects infinity. He wrote a standard work on reverse mathematics (subsystems of second order logic).

From 1980 to 1982 he was a Sloan Research Fellow . In 2007/8 he received the Grove Award for Interdisciplinary Research at Penn State. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society and the Association for Symbolic Logic , in whose Council (Counsil) he was from 1986 to 1989.

John R. Steel (officially with John West Addison) is one of his PhD students .

Fonts

• Subsystems of Second order logic, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition 2009 (reverse mathematics)
• Editor: Reverse Mathematics 2001, AKPeters 2005
• Degrees of unsolvability, in Barwise (Ed.) Handbook of Mathematical Logic , North Holland 1977, pp. 631-652

Web links

• Homepage at Penn State

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stephen G. Simpson in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ↑ Wolchover To settle infinity dispute a new law of logic , Quanta Magazine 2013
3. ↑ Carl Mummert, Review by John Stillwell, Reverse Mathematics , Notices AMS, October 2018, p. 1099