Joseph Robert Shoenfield (1927, Detroit – November 15, 2000,

Durham, North Carolina Durham ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the county seat of Durham County. Small portions of the city limits extend into Orange County and Wake County. With a population of 283,506 in the 2020 Census, Durham is the 4th- ...

) was an American mathematical logician.

Education

Shoenfield obtained his PhD in 1953 with

Raymond Louis Wilder Raymond Louis Wilder (3 November 1896 in Palmer, Massachusetts – 7 July 1982 in Santa Barbara, California) was an American mathematician, who specialized in topology and gradually acquired philosophical and anthropological interests. Life Wilde ...

at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

(''Models of formal systems'').

Career

From 1952, he lectured at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist Jam ...

, where he remained until becoming Emeritus in 1992. From 1970 to 1973 he was President of the Mathematics Faculty. In 1956/57 he was 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 ...

. Shoenfield worked on

recursion theory Computability theory, also known as recursion theory, is a branch of mathematical logic, computer science, and the theory of computation that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees. The field has sinc ...

model theory In mathematical logic, model theory is the study of the relationship between theory (mathematical logic), formal theories (a collection of Sentence (mathematical logic), sentences in a formal language expressing statements about a Structure (math ...

and

axiomatic set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly concern ...

. His textbook on mathematical logic has become a classic.

Honors

From 1972 to 1976 he was president of the

Association for Symbolic Logic The Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) is an international organization of specialists in mathematical logic and philosophical logic. The ASL was founded in 1936, and its first president was Alonzo Church. The current president of the ASL is ...

. He delivered the Gödel Lecture at the 1992 meeting of the ASL.

Hobbies

Already in his student days, he was a passionate and strong

contract bridge Contract bridge, or simply bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard 52-card deck. In its basic format, it is played by four players in two competing partnerships, with partners sitting opposite each other around a table. Millions ...

player. He was an early membe
Number 694
of the

American Go Association The American Go Association (AGA) was founded in 1935, to promote the board game of Go in the United States. Founded by chess master Edward Lasker and some friends at Chumley's restaurant in New York City, the AGA is one of the oldest Western ...

and th
Memorial Tournament
in North Carolina was founded in his memory. (The link includes a photograph of him.)

Selected publications

* Mathematical Logic, Addison Wesley 1967, 2nd edition, Association for Symbolic Logic, 2001 * Degrees of unsolvability, North Holland Mathematical Studies 1971 * Recursion theory, Springer 1993.

Notes

References

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Shoenfield, Joseph R 20th-century American mathematicians Duke University faculty Mathematical logicians American logicians 1927 births 2000 deaths University of Michigan alumni Gödel Lecturers