Simon B. Kochen

Simon Bernhard Kochen (born 14 August 1934) is a Canadian mathematician working in the fields of model theory, number theory and quantum mechanics. He was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and escaped the Nazis with his family thanks to a courageous Norwegian ship captain; he was raised in England and then moved to Canada, where he attended McGill University and obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees. He moved to the United States and received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1958 under Alonzo Church, with a thesis on ultrafiltered products and arithmetical extensions. Since 1967 he has been a member of Princeton's Department of Mathematics, which he chaired from 1989 to 1992, and in 1994 he became the Henry Burchard Fine Professor. In 1967 he shared the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory with James Ax.