Solomon Feferman (December 13, 1928 – July 26, 2016) was an American

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

and

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

who worked in

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of forma ...

Life

Solomon Feferman was born in

The Bronx The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

to working-class parents who had immigrated to the United States after

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

and had met and married in New York. Neither parent had any advanced education. The family moved to Los Angeles, where Feferman graduated from high school at age 16. He received his B.S. from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1948, and in 1957 his Ph.D. in mathematics from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, under Alfred Tarski, after having been drafted and having served in the U.S. Army from 1953 to 1955. In 1956 he was appointed to the Departments of Mathematics and Philosophy at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

, where he later became the Patrick Suppes Professor of Humanities and Sciences. Feferman died on 26 July 2016 at his home in

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...

, following an illness that lasted three months and a

stroke A stroke is a disease, medical condition in which poor cerebral circulation, blood flow to the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: brain ischemia, ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and intracranial hemorrhage, hemorr ...

. At his death, he had been a member of the MAA for 37 years.

Contributions

Feferman was editor-in-chief of the five-volume ''Collected 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 had an imm ...

, published by

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print book ...

between 2001 and 2013. In 2004, together with his wife Anita Burdman Feferman, he published a biography of Alfred Tarski: ''Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic''. He worked on predicative mathematics, in particular introducing the

Feferman–Schütte ordinal In mathematics, the Feferman–Schütte ordinal Γ0 is a large countable ordinal. It is the proof-theoretic ordinal of several mathematical theories, such as arithmetical transfinite recursion. It is named after Solomon Feferman and Kurt Schütte ...

as a measure of the strength of certain predicative systems.

Recognition

Feferman was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the art ...

in 1972 and 1986 and the Rolf Schock Prize in logic and philosophy in 2003. He was invited to give the

Gödel Lecture The Gödel Lecture is an honor in mathematical logic given by the Association for Symbolic Logic, associated with an annual lecture at the association's general meeting. The award is named after Kurt Gödel and has been given annually since 1990. ...

in 1997 and the Tarski Lectures in 2006. In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meeting ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved December 2, 2012.

Publications

Papers

*Feferman, Solomon; Vaught, Robert L. (1959), "The first order properties of products of algebraic systems", ''Fund. Math.'' 47, 57–103. *Feferman, Solomon (1975), "A language and axioms for explicit mathematics", ''Algebra and logic'' (Fourteenth Summer Res. Inst., Austral. Math. Soc., Monash Univ., Clayton, 1974), pp. 87–139, Lecture Notes in Math., vol. 450, Berlin, Springer. *Feferman, Solomon (1979), "Constructive theories of functions and classes", ''Logic Colloquium '78 (Mons, 1978)'', pp. 159–224, Stud. Logic Foundations Math., 97, Amsterdam, New York, North-Holland. *Buchholz, Wilfried; Feferman, Solomon; Pohlers, Wolfram; Sieg, Wilfried (1981), "Iterated inductive definitions and subsystems of analysis: recent proof-theoretical studies", ''Lecture Notes in Mathematics'', 897, Berlin, New York, Springer-Verlag. *Feferman, Solomon; Hellman, Geoffrey (1995), "Predicative foundations of arithmetic", ''J. Philos. Logic'' 24 (1), 1–17. * Avigad, Jeremy; Feferman, Solomon (1998), "Gödel's functional (''Dialectica'') interpretation", ''Handbook of proof theory'', 337–405, Stud. Logic Found. Math., 137, Amsterdam, North-Holland.

Books

*Feferman, Solomon. (1998). ''In the Light of Logic''. Oxford University Press. , Logic and Computation in Philosophy series. *

References

External links

Solomon Feferman official website
(via

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

) at

{{DEFAULTSORT:Feferman, Solomon 1928 births 21st-century American mathematicians American logicians Jewish American scientists Jewish philosophers Mathematical logicians American historians of mathematics University of California, Berkeley alumni Rolf Schock Prize laureates Stanford University Department of Philosophy faculty Stanford University Department of Mathematics faculty Philosophers of mathematics Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Tarski lecturers 2016 deaths 21st-century American Jews Gödel Lecturers 20th-century American mathematicians