William W. Tait

William Walker Tait (* 1929 in Freeport (New York) ) is an American philosopher and mathematical logician.

Tait graduated from Lehigh University with a bachelor's degree in 1952 and received his doctorate in 1959 from Yale University with Frederic Fitch (The theory of partial recursive operators). As a student he received a Fulbright scholarship, as did Leon Henkin in Amsterdam, among others with Arend Heyting and in 1957 attended the summer school in logic at Cornell University , where Alfred Tarski taught , among others . He was then assistant professor at Stanford University until 1964 (where he had a logic seminar with Georg Kreisel and Solomon Feferman with contacts from Berkeley to Tarski, among others), where he was at the Institute for Advanced Study with Kurt Gödel in 1961/62 , and then at the University of Illinois at Chicago and 1971/72 professor at the University of Aarhus . From 1972 he was a professor at the University of Chicago , where he headed the philosophy faculty from 1981 to 1987.

He initially deals with mathematical logic and later mainly with the philosophy of mathematics and its history ( Georg Cantor , Gottlob Frege , Kurt Gödel , Gerhard Gentzen ).

In 1966 he proved in the proof theory that Gaisi Takeuti's conjecture applies to predicate logic 2nd level (validity of the rule of intersection, see Gentzenscher's law ). He used a semantic method from Kurt Schütte .

In 2002 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was selected as a Tarski Lecturer for 2016 .

Fonts

• Editors: Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein (in honor of Leonard Linsky), Lasalle: Open Court 1996
  • therein from Tait: Frege versus Cantor and Dedekind: on the concept of number
• The Provenance of Pure Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Its History, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005
• Five Questions, in: VF Hendricks, H Leitgeb (Ed.), Philosophy of Mathematics, Five Questions, Automatic Press 2008 (with biographical information)
• A nonconstructive proof of Gentzen's Hauptsatz for second order predicate logic, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 72, 1966, pp. 980-983.
• Intensional interpretation of functionals of finite type I, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Volume 32, 1967, pp. 198-212.

Web links

• Homepage at the University of Chicago

Individual evidence

1. ↑ IAS Membership Book 1980
2. ↑ William W. Tait in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ↑ According to IAS membership book 1980, according to own information in Five Questions 1962/63
4. ↑ Kurt Schütte, Newer Results of the Theory of Proof, ICM 1966, pdf ( Memento from December 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive )