was a Japanese

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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

, known for his work in

proof theory Proof theory is a major branchAccording to , proof theory is one of four domains mathematical logic, together with model theory, axiomatic set theory, and recursion theory. consists of four corresponding parts, with part D being about "Proof The ...

. After graduating from

Tokyo University The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

, he went to Princeton to study under

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 profoundly ...

. He later became a professor at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

. Takeuti was president (2003–2009) of the Kurt Gödel Society, having worked on the book ''Memoirs of a Proof Theorist: Godel and Other Logicians''. His goal was to prove the

consistency In deductive logic, a consistent theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. A theory T is consistent if there is no formula \varphi such that both \varphi and its negation \lnot\varphi are elements of the set of consequences ...

of the real numbers. To this end, Takeuti's conjecture speculates that a

sequent In mathematical logic, a sequent is a very general kind of conditional assertion. : A_1,\,\dots,A_m \,\vdash\, B_1,\,\dots,B_n. A sequent may have any number ''m'' of condition formulas ''Ai'' (called " antecedents") and any number ''n'' of ass ...

formalisation of

second-order logic In logic and mathematics, second-order logic is an extension of first-order logic, which itself is an extension of propositional logic. Second-order logic is in turn extended by higher-order logic and type theory. First-order logic quantifies on ...

has cut-elimination.. An erratum to this article was published in the same journal as . He is also known for his work on ordinal diagrams with Akiko Kino.

Publications

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2013 Dover reprint
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Notes

External links

Presidents of the Kurt Gödel SocietyTakeuti Symposium (contains relevant birthdate information)
* * 1926 births 2017 deaths Japanese logicians 20th-century Japanese philosophers 21st-century Japanese philosophers Proof theorists University of Tokyo alumni University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Scientists from Ishikawa Prefecture {{Asia-mathematician-stub