SOLOMON FEFERMAN


Date of Birth:    December 13, 1928

Place of Birth:    New York, New York

Education:

B.S. California Institute of Technology, 1948 (Mathematics)

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1957 (Mathematics)
Ph.D. Advisor: Alfred Tarski

Military Service: U.S. Army, 1953-55

Professional Record

1956-58    Instructor of Mathematics and Philosophy, Stanford University

1958-62    Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, Stanford University

1959-60    NSF Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

1958-63    Consultant, Stanford Research Institute

1962-68    Associate Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, Stanford University

1964-65    NSF Senior Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Paris and University of Amsterdam

1967-68    Visiting Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1968-2003  Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, Stanford University (Emeritus, 2004)

1972-73    Guggenheim Fellow, University of Oxford and University of Paris

1979-80    Visiting Fellow at All Souls and Wolfson Colleges, University of Oxford

1985-92    Chairman, Department of Mathematics, Stanford University (on leave 1986-87 and 1989-90)

1986-87    Guggenheim Fellow, Stanford University, ETH Zürich, University of Rome

1989-90    Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center

1993-2003   Patrick Suppes Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University (Emeritus, 2004)

1995-96    Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University

2001      Fellow (April and May, 2001), Mittag-Leffler Institute, Djursholm, Sweden

2003 Visiting Professor of Philosophy, UC Berkeley, Spring Semester

 

Honors

Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1990

University of California at Irvine Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow, Oct. 1999

Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy for 2003


Activities

Member, Executive Committee and Council, Association for Symbolic Logic, 1964-67

Editor, Transactions and Memoirs, American Mathematical Society, 1976-79

Editor, Ergebnisse der Mathematik (Springer-Verlag), 1986-2003

Editor, Perspectives in Mathematical Logic (ASL/Springer-Verlag), 1986-2003

Member, AMS Committee on Translations, 1980-82

President, Association for Symbolic Logic, 1980-82

Advisory Editor, Studies in Proof Theory (Bibliopolis), 1983-

Member, Steering Committee, 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians, 1983-86

Editor-in-Chief, Kurt Gödel Collected Works, 1982-2003

 

Named Lectures

Association for Symbolic Logic Retiring Presidential Address, "Reflecting on incompleteness", 30 Dec 1983, Boston University.

Thoralf Skolem Lectures, "New life for Skolem's finitist program", 4 Sept 1989, "Foundational ways", 5 Sept 1989, University of Oslo.

E. W. Beth Lectures, "Logics for termination and correctness of functional programs", 20 March 1990, Delft University of Technology, and "Infinity in mathematics: Where is it necessary?", 21March 1990, University of Amsterdam.

Association for Symbolic Logic Annual Gödel Lecture, "Occupations and preoccupations with Gödel: His Works and the work", 22 March 1997, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Spinoza Lecture at ESSLLI, "What is a logical operation? (According to Tarski, McGee, and me.)", 13 August 1997, Université de Provence.

Alfred Tarski Lectures, "Truth unbound", 3 April 2006, "The 'logic' question", 5 April 2006, "Real computation", 7 April 2006, University of California at Berkeley.

Ernest Nagel Lectures, "Gödel, Nagel, minds and machines", 27 Sept 2007, Columbia University.

Martin Löb Lectures (inaugural), "Operational set theory and 'small' large cardinals", 12 May 2008, "Gödel, Nagel, minds and machines", 13 May 2008, University of Leeds.

Paul Bernays Lectures (inaugural), "Bernays, Gödel and Hilbert's consistency program", 11 Sept 2012, "Is the continuum hypothesis a definite mathematical problem?", 12 Sept 2012, "Foundations of unlimited category theory", 12 Sept 2012, ETH Zürich.