Everything about Dana Scott totally explained
Dana Stewart Scott (born
1932) is the emeritus
Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at
Carnegie Mellon University; he's now retired and lives in
Berkeley, California. His research career has spanned
computer science,
mathematics, and
philosophy, and has been characterized by a marriage of a concern for elucidating fundamental concepts in the manner of informal rigor, with a cultivation of mathematically hard problems that bear on these concepts. His work on
automata theory earned him the
ACM Turing Award in
1976, while his collaborative work with
Christopher Strachey in the
1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the
semantics of programming languages. He has worked also on
modal logic,
topology, and
category theory. He is the editor-in-chief of the new journal
Logical Methods in Computer Science.
Early career
He received his
BA in Mathematics from the
University of California, Berkeley in
1954.
He wrote his
Ph.D. thesis on
Convergent Sequences of Complete Theories under the supervision of
Alonzo Church while at Princeton, and defended his thesis in
1958. After completing his Ph.D. studies, he moved to the
University of Chicago, working as an instructor there until 1960.
In
1959, he published a joint paper with
Michael O. Rabin, a colleague from Princeton, entitled
Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem, which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines to
automata theory. This work led to the joint bestowal of the
Turing Award on the two, for the introduction of this fundamental concept of
computational complexity theory.
University of California, Berkeley, 1960–1963
Scott took up a post as Assistant Professor of Mathematics, at the
University of California, Berkeley, the university of
Alfred Tarski, and involved himself with classical issues in
mathematical logic, especially
set theory and Tarskian
model theory.
During this period he started supervising Ph.D. students, such as James Halpern (
Contributions to the Study of the Independence of the Axiom of Choice) and
Edgar Lopez-Escobar (
Infinitely Long Formulas with Countable Quantifier Degrees). Scott's work as research supervisor has been an important source of his intellectual influence.
Modal logic
Scott also began working on
modal logic in this period, beginning a collaboration with
John Lemmon, who moved to
Claremont, California in
1963. Scott was especially interested in
tense logic and the connection to the treatment of time in natural-language semantics, and began collaborating with
Richard Montague (Copeland 2004). Later, Scott and Montague were independently to discover an important generalisation of
Kripke semantics for modal and tense logic called
Scott-Montague semantics (Scott 1970).
John Lemmon and Scott began work on a modal-logic textbook that was interrupted by Lemmon's death in
1966. Scott circulated the incomplete monograph amongst colleagues, introducing a number of important techniques in the semantics of model theory, most importantly presenting a refinement of
canonical model that became standard, and introducing the technique of constructing models through
filtrations, both of which are core concepts in modern
Kripke semantics (Blackburn, de Rijke, and Venema, 2001). Scott eventually published the work as
An Introduction to Modal Logic (Lemmon and Scott, 1977).
Stanford, Amsterdam and Princeton, 1963–1972
Following an initial observation of
Robert Solovay, Scott formulated the concept of
Boolean-valued model (Solovay and
Petr Vopěnka did likewise at around the same time). In
1967 Scott published a paper,
A Proof of the Independence of the Continuum Hypothesis, in which he used Boolean-valued models to provide an alternate analysis of the independence of the
continuum hypothesis to that provided by
Paul Cohen. This work led to the award of the
Leroy P. Steele Prize in
1972.
Oxford University, 1972–1981
Scott took up a post as Professor of Mathematical Logic on the Philosophy faculty of
Oxford University in
1972.
Semantics of programming languages
This period saw Scott working closely with
Christopher Strachey, and the two
managed, despite intense administrative pressures, to oversee a great deal of fundamental work on providing a mathematical foundation for the semantics of programming languages, the work for which Scott is best known. Together, their work constitutes the Scott-Strachey approach to
denotational semantics; it constitutes one of the most influential pieces of work in
theoretical computer science and can perhaps be regarded as founding one of the major schools of
computer science. One of Scott's largest contributions is his formulation of
domain theory, allowing programs involving recursive functions and looping-control constructs to be given a denotational semantics. Additionally, he provided a foundation for the understanding of infinitary and continuous information through domain theory and his theory of
information systems.
Scott's work of this period led to the bestowal of:
- The 1990 Harold Pender Award for his application of concepts from logic and algebra to the development of mathematical semantics of programming languages;
- The 1997 Rolf Schock Prize in logic and philosophy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his conceptually oriented logical works, especially the creation of domain theory, which has made it possible to extend Tarski's semantical paradigm to programming languages as well as to construct models of Curry's combinatory logic and Church's calculus of lambda conversion; and
- The 2001 Bolzano Prize for Merit in the Mathematical Sciences by the Czech Academy of Sciences.
- The 2007 EATCS Award for his contribution to theoretical computer science.
Carnegie Mellon University 1981–2003
At
Carnegie Mellon University, Scott proposed the theory of
equilogical spaces as a generalization of domain theory. In 1994 he was inducted as a
Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery.
Further Information
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