Stephen Cole Kleene
Stephen Cole Kleene
Stephen Cole Kleene /ˈkliːniː/ KLEE-neewas an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. Kleene's work grounds the study of which functions are computable. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star, Kleene's recursion theorem...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth5 January 1909
CountryUnited States of America
I don't think Post often came to Princeton during the '30s. I can't remember ever seeing him in Princeton.
I went to Princeton from Amherst, where I split my interests between mathematics and philosophy.
Here at Wisconsin we didn't get an undergraduate course in mathematical logic until the '60s.
I think Veblen had an interest in logic.
I went to Princeton in the fall of 1930 as a half-time instructor.
It wasn't until my second year that I got to actually work with Church.
I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic.
I had some hesitations about philosophy because, if you worked out a philosophical theory, it was hard to know whether you were going to be able to prove it or whether other theories had just as good a claim on belief.