(Nels) David Nelson, an American mathematician and logician, was born on January 2, 1918, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Upon graduation from the Ph.D. program at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
, Nelson relocated to Washington, D.C. Nelson remained in Washington, D.C. as a Professor of Mathematics at
The George Washington University
, mottoeng = "God is Our Trust"
, established =
, type = Private federally chartered research university
, academic_affiliations =
, endowment = $2.8 billion (2022)
, preside ...
until his death on August 22, 2003.
Education
David Nelson completed his undergraduate and graduate coursework at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1939 and 1940, respectivel
Nelson completed his Ph.D. at Madison in 1946. His dissertation, entitled "Recursive Functions and Intuitionistic Number Theory," served as the capstone project for his doctorate. Fellow mathematician
Stephen Cole Kleene
Stephen Cole Kleene ( ; January 5, 1909 – January 25, 1994) was an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of ...
served as Nelson's doctoral advisor. Nelson, consequently, was Kleene's first doctoral studen
According to the ''Association for Symbolic Logic'':
Nelson's research was in the area of intuitionistic logic and its connection with recursive function theory. He investigated the relationship, in intuitionistic formal systems, between a truth definition and the provability of formulas representing statements of number theory. Kleene had previously introduced the intuitionistic truth definition and arithmetized this truth notion in his definition of realizability of a formula by a number. As a consequence, they demonstrated that certain classically true formulas are unverifiable in the intuitionistic predicate calculus with strong negatio
Professional career
Nelson taught at
Amherst College
Amherst College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher educatio ...
from 1942 to 1946 as an assistant professor. Upon completion of his doctoral studies, Nelson accepted an assistant professor position with the Department of Mathematics at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1946. Nelson was officially promoted to the position of professor in 1958.
After a decade of service to the university, Nelson received chairmanship of the Department of Mathematics, a position which he held from 1956 to 196
Publications
''The Journal of Symbolic Logic'' published Nelson's piece, "Constructible Falsity" in its fourteenth volume in 1949. This paper dealt with the issues of constructive logic in relation to intuitionistic truth. ''The Journal of Symbolic Logic'' also published a review of another Nelson piece, "Non-null Implication" in its thirty-third volume in 196
Students
David Nelson oversaw the dissertation work of the George Washington University student John Kent Minichiello, who authored "Negationless Intuitionistic Mathematics" in 196
Minichiello received the
Ruggles Prize William Ruggles (September 5, 1797 – September 10, 1877) was a professor at George Washington University.
Biography
William Ruggles was born in Rochester, Massachusetts, about fifty miles south of present-day Boston, on Tuesday September 5, 17 ...
for Mathematics in 1963 for excellence in mathematics under the direction of Nelson.
Associations and memberships
•Member, Executive Committee of the Association for Symbolic Logic, 1949–1953
•Consultant, National Research Council, 1960–1963
Notes
External links
*
1918 births
2003 deaths
American logicians
American mathematicians
University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
George Washington University faculty
{{morecat, date=February 2022