Richard Montague

Richard Merritt Montague, born in 1930 and dead in 1971, was an American mathematician and philosopher who worked in mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. A student of Alfred Tarski at the University of California, Berkeley, he took his doctorate in philosophy in 1957 with a dissertation on the axiomatic foundations of set theory, which contained the first proof that standard ZFC set theory cannot be finitely axiomatised. He spent his career in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he supervised Nino Cocchiarella and Hans Kamp. He is best known for Montague grammar, a logical approach to the semantics of natural language that influenced categorial grammar and discourse representation theory. He died at the age of forty in his own home, and the killing has never been solved.