Anil Nerode

Anil Nerode (born 1932) is an American mathematician known for his work in mathematical logic and for a tenure of many decades as a professor at Cornell University. He entered the University of Chicago at fifteen and took his Ph.D. there in 1956 under Saunders Mac Lane, with a thesis on an algebraic formulation of substitution in many-sorted free algebras and its link to the partial recursive functions. He worked at an air weapons research institute, spent 1958 to 1959 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton working with Kurt Godel, and joined Cornell in 1959, later holding the Goldwin Smith chair of mathematics. His interests include mathematical logic, automata theory, computability and complexity theory, the calculus of variations and distributed systems. With John Myhill he proved the Myhill-Nerode theorem, which gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a formal language to be regular, and with Bakhadyr Khoussainov he founded the theory of automatic structures. He became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012, and Cornell recognised his sixtieth year as faculty in 2019 to 2020 as its longest tenure.