William Bigelow Easton

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William Bigelow Easton is an American mathematician who studies axiomatic set theory.

Easton received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University with Anil Nerode and received his PhD in 1964 from Princeton University with Alonzo Church ( Powers of regular cardinals ). He then worked for Applied Logic Corporation in Princeton. In the early 1970s he was a lecturer in computer science at Rutgers University .

He is known for Easton's theorem, which he proved in his dissertation and which, after Paul Cohen's proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis (CH) in ZF set theory with Cohen's forcing method, showed that the violation of the generalized CH for regular cardinal numbers almost showed could be anything. Robert M. Solovay had previously achieved partial results. The forcing method developed by Easton is also called Easton forcing (or class forcing). He developed it as part of his dissertation a few weeks after hearing a lecture by Cohen in May 1963 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in which he explained his forcing method. Easton's preprint was widely used and introduced the forcing method to a wider circle of logicians.

Apart from the work that resulted from his dissertation, he published little on set theory. As a computer scientist, he dealt with operating systems .

Fonts

  • Powers of regular cardinals, Annals of Mathematical Logic, Volume 1, 1970, pp. 139-178 (dissertation)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Memories of Nerode on his website
  2. ^ William Bigelow Easton in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  3. ↑ James Cattell (ed.) American Men of Science 1965. According to the information in his essay from 1970 (see writings) he was there in 1969. Around 1970 the company ran into financial difficulties and in 1975 it filed for bankruptcy.
  4. ^ Saul Amarel, Proposal for a Ph.D. Program in Computer Science, Rutgers University 1970
  5. ↑ Nerode, loc. cit.
  6. ↑ In 1965 he reviews the essay by Paul Cohen The Independence of the Continuum Hypothesis (Proc. Nat. Acad. 1963/64) in the J. of Symbolic Logic, Volume 30, pp. 398-399 and in the same edition A minimal model of set theory by Cohen. Also an announcement of his dissertation Proper classes of generic sets , Notices AMS 1964
  7. ↑ William B. Easton Process Synchronization without Long-Term Interlock , SOSP '71, Proceedings of the third ACM symposium on Operating systems principles 1971, pp. 95-100. Even as a computer scientist, he doesn't seem to have published much more. In 1964 he published with James H. Bennett Semi-Automated Mathematics - SAM IV (Defense Technical Information Center) on experiments on automatic proof systems in logic.
personal data
SURNAME Easton, William Bigelow
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century