Dana Scott

Dana Stewart Scott, born on 11 October 1932 in Berkeley, California, is a retired American logician. With Michael O. Rabin he received the 1976 ACM Turing Award for their joint work on automata theory, which introduced nondeterministic finite automata. He also made seminal contributions to modal logic, set theory and the theory of programming languages, and created domain theory, a branch of mathematics that gives a foundation to the semantics of programming languages and computability. He took his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1958 under Alonzo Church, with a dissertation on convergent sequences of complete Boolean algebras. He proved that the axiom of constructibility is incompatible with a measurable cardinal, formulated Boolean-valued models in his 1967 analysis of the independence of the continuum hypothesis, and with Richard Montague found the generalisation of Kripke semantics now called Scott-Montague semantics. With Christopher Strachey at Oxford he developed the Scott-Strachey approach to denotational semantics. He later taught at Carnegie Mellon University, and proposed equilogical spaces as a successor to domain theory.