John Lane Bell (born March 25, 1945) is an Anglo-Canadian philosopher, mathematician and logician. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the

University of Western Ontario The University of Western Ontario (UWO), also known as Western University or Western, is a public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thames R ...

in Canada. His research includes such topics as

set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies 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 mathematics, is mostly concern ...

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 (math ...

lattice theory A lattice is an abstract structure studied in the mathematical subdisciplines of order theory and abstract algebra. It consists of a partially ordered set in which every pair of elements has a unique supremum (also called a least upper bou ...

modal logic Modal logic is a collection of formal systems developed to represent statements about necessity and possibility. It plays a major role in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and natural language semantics. Modal logics extend ot ...

quantum logic In the mathematical study of logic and the physical analysis of quantum foundations, quantum logic is a set of rules for manipulation of propositions inspired by the structure of quantum theory. The field takes as its starting point an observ ...

, constructive mathematics,

type theory In mathematics, logic, and computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system, and in general type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a founda ...

topos theory In mathematics, a topos (, ; plural topoi or , or toposes) is a category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space (or more generally: on a site). Topoi behave much like the category of sets and possess a notio ...

, infinitesimal analysis, spacetime theory, and the

philosophy of mathematics The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in people' ...

. He is the author of more than 70 articles and of 13 books. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...

Biography

John Bell was awarded a scholarship to

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

at the age of 15, and graduated with a D.Phil. in Mathematics: his dissertation supervisor was John Crossley. During 1968–89 he was Lecturer in Mathematics and Reader in Mathematical Logic at the

London School of Economics , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 milli ...

. Bell's students include

Graham Priest Graham Priest (born 1948) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a regular visitor at the University of Melbourne, where he was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy and also at the University of St Andr ...

(Ph.D. Mathematics LSE, 1972), Michael Hallett (Ph.D. Philosophy LSE, 1979), David DeVidi (Ph.D. Philosophy UWO, 1994), Elaine Landry (Ph.D. Philosophy UWO, 1997) and Richard Feist (Ph.D. Philosophy UWO, 1999).

Bibliography

*''The Continuous, the Discrete, and the Infinitesimal in Philosophy and Mathematics '' (New and Revised Edition of 2005 book), Springer, 2019. *''Oppositions and Paradoxes: Philosophical Perplexities in Science and Mathematics.'' Broadview Press, 2016. *''Intuitionistic Set Theory''. College Publications, 2013. *''Set Theory: Boolean-Valued Models and Independence Proofs''. Oxford University Press 2011. *''The Axiom of Choice''. College Publications, 2009.
''The Continuous and the Infinitesimal in Mathematics and Philosophy''
Polimetrica, 2005. *(With D. DeVidi and G. Solomon) ''Logical Options: An Introduction to Classical and Alternative Logics''. Broadview Press, 2001. *''The Art of the Intelligible: An Elementary Survey of Mathematics in its Conceptual Development''. Kluwer, 1999.
''A Primer of Infinitesimal Analysis''
Cambridge University Press, 1998. Second Edition, 2008. *''Toposes & Local Set Theories: An Introduction''. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988. Reprinted by Dover, 2008. *''Boolean-Valued Models and Independence Proofs in Set Theory''. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977. 2nd edition, 1985. 3rd edition, 2005. *(With M. Machover)
''A Course in Mathematical Logic''
North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1977. 4th printing, 2003. *(With A. B. Slomson). ''Models and Ultraproducts: An Introduction''. North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1969

2006.

References

External links

John Bell's webpageJohn Bell at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bell, John Lane 1945 births 20th-century Canadian mathematicians 20th-century Canadian philosophers 21st-century Canadian mathematicians 21st-century Canadian philosophers Academics of the London School of Economics Alumni of the University of Oxford Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada Living people Academic staff of the National University of Singapore Model theorists Philosophers of mathematics Set theorists University of Western Ontario faculty