Thomas Edward Forster (born 12 April 1948) is a British set theorist and philosopher. His work has focused on Quine's

New Foundations In mathematical logic, New Foundations (NF) is an axiomatic set theory, conceived by Willard Van Orman Quine as a simplification of the theory of types of ''Principia Mathematica''. Quine first proposed NF in a 1937 article titled "New Foundations ...

, the theory of well-quasi-orders and better-quasi-orders, and various topics in philosophy. Forster is an Affiliated Lecturer at

DPMMS The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge comprises the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS) and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). It is housed in the Centre for ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, a bye-fellow at

Queens' College Queens' College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Queens' is one of the oldest colleges of the university, founded in 1448 by Margaret of Anjou. The college spans the River Cam, colloquially referred to as the "light s ...

, and holds honorary appointments for many other organisations worldwide, including the

Center for Philosophy of Science The Center for Philosophy of Science is an academic center located at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dedicated to research in the philosophy of science. The center was founded by Adolf Grünbaum in 1960. The current direc ...

in Pittsburgh, the Centre National de Recherches de Logique in Belgium, and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at the

University of Auckland , mottoeng = By natural ability and hard work , established = 1883; years ago , endowment = NZD $293 million (31 December 2021) , budget = NZD $1.281 billion (31 December 2021) , chancellor = Cecilia Tarrant , vice_chancellor = Dawn F ...

. Amongst his undergraduate supervisees are

Rosi Sexton Rosemary Ann Sexton (born 16 July 1977) is a British athlete, sports therapist, osteopath, and politician. She had a career in mixed martial arts (MMA), from which she retired in 2014. In 2020, Sexton ran in the Green Party leadership electi ...

, Richard Taylor,

Rebecca Kitteridge Rebecca Lucy Kitteridge (born ) is the current director of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. Life Kitteridge attended Upper Hutt College, and is a graduate of Victoria University of Wellington. She was Secretary of the Cabinet ...

Doug Gurr Douglas John Gurr (born July 1964) is a British businessman, and the Director of the Natural History Museum, London. He was a global vice-president and head of Amazon UK from 2016 to 2020. He is chairman of the British Heart Foundation. He former ...

Sarah Flannery Sarah Flannery (born 1982, County Cork, Ireland) was, at sixteen years old, the winner of the 1999 Esat Young Scientist Exhibition for her development of the Cayley–Purser algorithm, based on work she had done with researchers at Baltimore T ...

and

Ursula Martin Ursula Hilda Mary Martin (born 3 August 1953) is a British computer scientist, with research interests in theoretical computer science and formal methods. She is also known for her activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of comput ...

. Forster was awarded the J.T. Knight Prize as a PhD student at

in 1974. His article "The Iterative Conception of Set" was recognised by the Philosophers' Annual as one of the ten best philosophy articles of 2008.

References

External links

Forster's website
at DPMMS, Cambridge.
Forster's CV

Thomas Edward Forster
at the

Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty ...

. *T.E. Forster. Set Theory with a Universal Set: Exploring an Untyped Universe
2nd ed
Oxford Logic Guides, Clarendon Press, 1995. Cambridge mathematicians British logicians Set theorists 1948 births Living people {{UK-mathematician-stub