Juliette Kennedy is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...

. Her main research interests are

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of Logic#Formal logic, formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory (also known as computability theory). Research in mathematical logic com ...

and the

foundations of mathematics Foundations of mathematics are the mathematical logic, logical and mathematics, mathematical framework that allows the development of mathematics without generating consistency, self-contradictory theories, and to have reliable concepts of theo ...

. In the course of her work she has published extensively on the works of

Kurt Gödel Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( ; ; April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel profoundly ...

Education and career

Kennedy is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki.

Research areas

Kennedy's research at the University of Helsinki focuses on

in the area of set-theoretic

model theory In mathematical logic, model theory is the study of the relationship between theory (mathematical logic), formal theories (a collection of Sentence (mathematical logic), sentences in a formal language expressing statements about a Structure (mat ...

and

set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies Set (mathematics), sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory – as a branch of mathema ...

. In the course of her mathematical work she also researches the

history of mathematics The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the History of mathematical notation, mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples ...

and the

. In this context she has sustained an extensive project to place the works of

in its historical and foundational context. In 2017 she published her research on the interplay between the works of

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer ...

and that of Gödel, who in 1956 defined the

P versus NP problem The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved. Here, "quickly" means an algorithm exists that ...

in a letter to

John von Neumann John von Neumann ( ; ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, in ...

Books

Kennedy and Roman Kossak are the editors of ''Set Theory, Arithmetic, and Foundations of Mathematics: Theorems, Philosophies'', published as Book 36 in the series ''Lecture Notes in Logic'' in 2012 by

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

. Kennedy is the editor of ''Interpreting Gödel: Critical Essays'', published in 2014 by

and reprinted in 2017. In the book Kennedy brought together leading contemporary philosophers and mathematicians to explore the impact of Gödel's work on the foundations and philosophy of mathematics. The logician

has in 1931 formulated the

incompleteness theorems Complete may refer to: Logic * Completeness (logic) * Completeness of a theory, the property of a theory that every formula in the theory's language or its negation is provable Mathematics * The completeness of the real numbers, which implies ...

, which among other things prove that within any formal system with resources sufficient to code arithmetic, questions exist which are neither provable nor disprovable on the basis of the

axioms An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word (), meaning 'that which is thought worthy or f ...

which define the system.

References

External links

Publication list
at

DBLP DBLP is a computer science bibliography website. Starting in 1993 at Universität Trier in Germany, it grew from a small collection of HTML files and became an organization hosting a database and logic programming bibliography site. Since Novem ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kennedy, Juliette Living people Women mathematicians Mathematical logicians Women logicians University of Helsinki Year of birth missing (living people)