达纳·斯科特1932—

简介

斯科特1932年10月11日生于美国加利福尼亚州，在加州大学伯克利分校获得学士学位以后，进入普林斯顿大学研究生院学习，与迈克尔·拉宾一起师从阿隆佐·邱奇，1958年取得博士学位。

他先后在芝加哥大学、加州大学伯克利分校、斯坦福大学、荷兰的阿姆斯特丹大学、普林斯顿大学和英国牛津大学等学府任教。1981年被卡内基梅隆大学聘为计算机科学、数理逻辑和哲学教授。

1959年，拉宾和达纳·斯科特共同发表了“有限自动机与其判定性问题”（Finite Automata and Their Decision Problems）的论文，提出了非确定自动机的观点。他们也因此获得了1976年的图灵奖，并做“逻辑与程序设计语言”（logic and Programming Language）的演讲。图灵奖的引文是：

Dana Stewart Scott (born October 11, 1932) is a retired American logician. Along with Michael O. Rabin he received the 1976 ACM Turing Award for their joint work on automata theory. He has made seminal contributions to automata theory, modal logic, set theory, and the theory of programming languages. He created domain theory, a branch of mathematics that provides a foundation for the theory of programming languages and computability.

Early life and education

Dana Stewart Scott was born on October 11, 1932, in Berkeley, California. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1954.

He then pursued graduate studies in mathematics at Princeton University, where he held a Bell Telephone Fellowship from 1956 to 1957. Scott earned his Ph.D. in 1958 under the supervision of the mathematical logician Alonzo Church, with a dissertation titled Convergent Sequences of Complete Boolean Algebras.

Solomon Feferman writes of this period:

Scott began his studies in logic at Berkeley in the early 50s while still an undergraduate. His unusual abilities were soon recognized and he quickly moved on to graduate classes and seminars with Tarski and became part of the group that surrounded him, including me and Richard Montague; so it was at that time that we became friends. Scott was clearly in line to do a Ph. D. with Tarski, but they had a falling out for reasons explained in our biography of Tarski.

Academic career

Chicago and Berkeley (1958–1963)

After completing his doctorate in 1958, Scott served as an instructor at the University of Chicago until 1960. He subsequently joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, serving as an assistant professor and later associate professor from 1960 to 1963, during which time he was also appointed a Miller Institute Research Fellow (1960–1961) at Berkeley, and involved himself with classical issues in mathematical logic, especially set theory and Tarskian model theory. He proved that the axiom of constructibility is incompatible with the existence of a measurable cardinal, a result considered seminal in the evolution of set 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).

Modal and tense logic

Scott also began working on modal logic in this period, beginning a collaboration with John Lemmon, who moved to Claremont, California, in 1963.

Stanford, Amsterdam and Princeton, 1963–1972

Following an initial observation of Robert Solovay, Scott formulated the concept of Boolean-valued model, as 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.

University of Oxford, 1972–1981

Scott took up a post as Professor of Mathematical Logic on the Philosophy faculty of the University of Oxford in 1972. He was member of Merton College while at Oxford and is now an Honorary Fellow of the college.

Semantics of programming languages

This period saw Scott working with Christopher Strachey, and the two

managed, despite administrative pressures, to do 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, an important and seminal contribution to theoretical computer science. One of Scott's contributions is his formulation of domain theory, allowing programs involving recursive functions and looping-control constructs to be given 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:

Carnegie Mellon University, 1981–2003

At Carnegie Mellon University, Scott proposed the theory of equilogical spaces as a successor theory to domain theory; among its many advantages, the category of equilogical spaces is a cartesian closed category, whereas the category of domains is not. In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.