W. Hugh Woodin

William Hugh Woodin, born on 23 April 1955 in Tucson, Arizona, is an American mathematician at Harvard University who specialises in set theory. He earned a bachelor's degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1977 and a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 under Robert M. Solovay, with a dissertation on discontinuous homomorphisms of C(Omega) and set theory. He taught at Caltech and then Berkeley, chaired the Berkeley mathematics department in 2002 and 2003, and moved to Harvard in 2015. His early work linked set theory with Banach algebras; in the 1980s he made major advances on the Axiom of Determinacy through inner model theory, fixing its consistency strength relative to large cardinals. A kind of large cardinal, the Woodin cardinal, carries his name. He developed Omega-logic and the generic multiverse, argues that the continuum hypothesis has a definite truth value, and proposed the Ultimate L programme. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.