王浩1921—1995

生平

1921年出生在中华民国的山东济南，1943年西南联合大学数学系毕业，1945年清华大学哲学系毕业，国内期间曾师从著名逻辑学家金岳霖。1948年哈佛大学逻辑学博士毕业，同年成为哈佛的助理教授。1950年代初，随保罗·伯奈斯在苏黎世学习。1956年获荐为牛津大学Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics。1959年，王浩在“IBM 704计算机”上用9分钟计算时间，证明了罗素、阿尔弗雷德·诺思·怀特海所著《数学原理》中数百余条数理逻辑定理；因此在1983年于国际人工智能联合会议荣获首届证明自动化奖（the first Milestone Prize for Automated Theorem-Proving）。1961年任命主持哈佛“数理逻辑和应用数学的Gordon McKay教授纪念讲座”。1967年至1991年，领导洛克斐勒大学的逻辑学小组，在那里他是数理逻辑学教授。

他证明了图灵机都可转为一组王氏砖（Wang tile）。

1968年，英国埃德加·科德针对“细胞自动机”提出自己的科德细胞自动机(Codd's cellular automaton)（以王浩的“Wang B-machine”为基础）论点，以探讨“人工生命”议题。

Hao Wang (Chinese: 王浩; pinyin: Wáng Hào; 20 May 1921 – 13 May 1995) was a Chinese-American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and commentator on Kurt Gödel.

Biography

Born in Jinan, Shandong, in the Republic of China (today in the People's Republic of China), Wang received his early education in China. He obtained a B.S. degree in mathematics from the National Southwestern Associated University in 1943 and an M.A. in philosophy from Tsinghua University in 1945, where his teachers included Feng Youlan and Jin Yuelin, after which he moved to the United States for further graduate studies. He studied logic under W. V. O. Quine at Harvard University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. He was appointed to an assistant professorship at Harvard the same year.

During the early 1950s, Wang studied with Paul Bernays in Zürich. In 1956, he was appointed Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. In 1959, Wang wrote on an IBM 704 computer a program that in only 9 minutes mechanically proved several hundred mathematical logic theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. In 1961, he was appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Mathematical Logic and Applied Mathematics at Harvard. From 1967 until 1991, he headed the logic research group at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he was professor of logic. In 1972, Wang joined in a group of Chinese American scientists led by Chih-Kung Jen as the first such delegation from the U.S. to the People's Republic of China.

In the 1950s, Hao's work used Marxism and Western analytical philosophy to critique the then-prevailing view of cognitive processes as mechanical computation. Hao contended instead that human reason is not influenced by universal rules, but rather is personal and influenced by historical and material conditions.

One of Wang's most important contributions was the Wang tile. He showed that any Turing machine can be turned into a set of Wang tiles. The domino problem is to find an algorithm that uses a set of Wang tiles to tile the plane. The first noted example of aperiodic tiling is a set of Wang tiles, whose nonexistence Wang had once conjectured, discovered by his student Robert Berger in 1966. Wang also had a significant influence on theory of computational complexity.

A philosopher in his own right, Wang also developed a penetrating interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mathematics, which he called "anthropologism." Later he broadened this reading in the foundations of mathematics. He chronicled Kurt Gödel's philosophical ideas and authored several books on the subject, thereby providing contemporary scholars many insights elucidating Gödel's later philosophical thought. He saw his own philosophy of "substantial factualism" as a middle ground that includes both abstract theoretical formulations and the ordinary language of everyday discourse.

In 1983 he was presented with the first Milestone Prize for Automated Theorem-Proving, sponsored by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

On 13 May 1995, Wang died at New York Hospital one week from his 74th birthday. According to his wife Hanne Tierney, Wang's cause of death was from lymphoma. In addition to Tierney, Wang was survived by a daughter and two sons.