Frederic Brenton Fitch (September 9, 1908,
Greenwich, Connecticut
Greenwich (, ) is a town in southwestern Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. At the 2020 census, the town had a total population of 63,518. The largest town on Connecticut's Gold Coast, Greenwich is home to many hedge funds and othe ...
– September 18, 1987,
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134 ...
) was an American
logician, a
Sterling Professor
Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a tenured faculty member considered the best in his or her field. It is akin to the rank of university professor at other universities.
The appointment, made by the ...
at
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...
.
Education and career
At Yale, Fitch earned his B.A in 1931 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1934 under the supervision of
F. S. C. Northrop
Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop (November 27, 1893 in Janesville, Wisconsin – July 22, 1992 in Exeter, New Hampshire) was an American legal philosopher and
influential comparative philosopher.
After receiving a B.A. from Beloit College in 19 ...
. From 1934 to 1937 Fitch was a postdoc at the
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...
. In 1937 he returned to Yale, where he taught until his retirement in 1977.
His doctoral students include
Alan Ross Anderson,
Ruth Barcan Marcus, and
William W. Tait.
Work
Fitch was the
inventor
An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...
of the
Fitch-style calculus Fitch notation, also known as Fitch diagrams (named after Frederic Fitch), is a notational system for constructing formal proofs used in sentential logics and predicate logics. Fitch-style proofs arrange the sequence of sentences that make up the ...
for arranging formal logical proofs as diagrams. In his 1963 published paper "A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts" he proves "Theorem 5" (originally by
Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, professor and editor who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer scien ...
), which later became famous in context of the
knowability paradox.
Fitch's Paradox of Knowability
in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. E ...
.
Fitch worked primarily in combinatory logic, authoring an undergraduate-level textbook on the subject (1974), but he also made significant contributions to intuitionism and modal logic. He was interested in the problem of the consistency, completeness, categoricity, and constructivity of logical theories, especially nonclassical logics, and contributed to the foundations of mathematics and to inductive probability. He dealt with the theory of references in "The Problem of the Morning Star and the Evening Star" (1949).
Works
* 1952: '' Symbolic Logic, An Introduction'', The Ronald Press Company
"A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts"
(This paper has over 400 citations.)
* 1974: '' Elements of Combinatory Logic'', Yale University Press
Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous.
, Yale Univers ...
See also
* Fitch notation
References
External links
Bibliography of papers by Frederic Fitch on PhilPapers
Frederic Brenton Fitch Papers.
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fitch, Frederic Brenton
1908 births
1987 deaths
American logicians
Yale Sterling Professors
20th-century American mathematicians