William Werner Boone (16 January 1920 in

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

– 14 September 1983 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American mathematician. He completed his undergrad degree as a part time student at the

University of Cincinnati The University of Cincinnati (UC or Cincinnati) is a public research university in Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1819 as Cincinnati College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in Cincinnati and has an annual enrollment of over 44,0 ...

Alonzo Church Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, philosopher, professor and editor who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer scien ...

was his Ph.D. advisor at

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

, and Kurt Gödel was his friend at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

Pyotr Novikov Pyotr Sergeyevich Novikov (russian: Пётр Серге́евич Но́виков; 15 August 1901, Moscow, Russian Empire – 9 January 1975, Moscow, Soviet Union) was a Soviet mathematician. Novikov is known for his work on combinatorial proble ...

showed in 1955 that there exists a finitely presented group ''G'' such that the word problem for ''G'' is undecidable. A different proof was obtained by Boone in 1958.

Selected publications

*W. W. Boone, ''Decision problems about algebraic and logical systems as a whole and recursively enumerable degrees of unsolvability.'' 1968 Contributions to Math. Logic (Colloquium, Hannover, 1966), North-Holland, Amsterdam. *W. W. Boone,

Roger Lyndon Roger Conant Lyndon (December 18, 1917 – June 8, 1988) was an American mathematician, for many years a professor at the University of Michigan.. He is known for Lyndon words, the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem, Craig–Lyndon interpolation a ...

, Frank Cannonito, ''Word Problems: Decision Problem in Group Theory'', North-Holland, 1973.

References

*''Kurt Gödel: Collected Works'': Oxford University Press: New York. Editor-in-chief:

Solomon Feferman Solomon Feferman (December 13, 1928 – July 26, 2016) was an American philosopher and mathematician who worked in mathematical logic. Life Solomon Feferman was born in The Bronx in New York City to working-class parents who had immigrated to th ...

, Volume IV: Correspondence, A–G, . * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Boone, William Werner 1920 births 1983 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians University of Cincinnati alumni Princeton University alumni American logicians University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty People from Cincinnati Mathematicians from Ohio Group theorists