Rosser Centennial Year

Hello, all. Sorry for not posting lately. Anyway. Happy New Year! I pronounce 2007 the

John Barkley Rosser, Sr. Centennial Year

Rosser was born December 6, 1907 and was one of the pioneers of modern mathematical logic, especially, of recursion theory and the λ-calculus. He also contributed to areas such as number theory and ballistics. As director of the Army Mathematics Research Center during the Vietnam War he was not an uncontroversial figure politically. He died September 5, 1989.

He is the (co-)author of three logic books:

J. Barkley Rosser and Atwell R. Turquette. Many-valued logic. Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1952.

J. Barkley Rosser. Logic for mathematicians. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1953.

J. Barkley Rosser. Simplified independence proofs: Boolean valued models of set theory. New York, Academic Press, 1969.

His two most famous papers are, no doubt:

J. Barkley Rosser. Extensions of some theorems of Gödel and Church. The Journal of Symbolic Logic 1 (1936) 87-91. doi:10.2307/2269028

Alonzo Church and J. Barkley Rosser. Some properties of conversion. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 39 (1936) 472-482. doi:10.2307/1989762

(Theorem 2 in this paper is “the Church-Rosser Theorem”)

Wisconsin Rosser memorial Resolution [PDF]
Interview with Kleene and Rosser from the Princeton Mathematics Oral History Project

One thought on “Rosser Centennial Year

  1. Rosser’s Logic for Mathematicians  must be one of the weirdest books ever — developed entirely within the framework of Quine’s (in)famous system “New Foundations”. Interesting that a mainstream mathematician such as Rosser would choose NF as the “standard” for teaching logic.  Posted by Aldo Antonelli

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