Robert M. Solovay

Robert Martin Solovay, born on 15 December 1938, is an American mathematician working in set theory. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1964 under Saunders Mac Lane and has spent his career at the University of California at Berkeley, where his doctoral students include W. Hugh Woodin and Matthew Foreman. His results include the theorem that, assuming an inaccessible cardinal, the statement that every set of real numbers is Lebesgue measurable is consistent with Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory without the axiom of choice, the isolation of the notion of 0#, and, with Stanley Tennenbaum, the method of iterated forcing. Outside set theory he developed, with Volker Strassen, the Solovay-Strassen primality test.