George Boolos

George Boolos (1940 to 1996) was an American philosopher and mathematical logician who spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied mathematics at Princeton University, took a B.Phil. at Oxford in 1963, and in 1966 earned the first PhD in philosophy ever awarded by MIT, working under Hilary Putnam. He became one of the early proponents of provability logic, which applies modal logic to the study of mathematical proof, and wrote the first book-length treatment of the subject, The Unprovability of Consistency, followed by The Logic of Provability. He also wrote on Gottlob Frege's system of arithmetic, showing how it could be freed of inconsistency, and argued for a plural reading of second-order quantification. With Richard Jeffrey he wrote the university text Computability and Logic. Boolos was known as a clear and witty speaker, and a posthumous collection, Logic, Logic, and Logic, gathers much of his best work.