William (“Invoice”) Walker Tait, professor emeritus of philosophy on the College of Chicago, has died.
Professor Tait was well-known for his work in philosophy of arithmetic and logic, significantly proof principle. He’s the creator of The Provenance of Pure Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Mathematics and its History, amongst many different works.
In a remembrance, Richard Zach (Calgary) discusses Professor Tait’s analysis:
He proved the consistency of second order logic, settling the Takeuti conjecture positively… His two most well-known contributions are maybe the event of the Schütte-Tait methodology of proving minimize elimination and the strategy of proving normalization for lambda calculus utilizing Tait computability predicates… His most influential contribution within the philosophy of arithmetic is what’s come to be often called “Tait’s thesis”: the identification of Hilbert’s “finitary standpoint” with what’s primitive recursively computable and provable in primitive recursive arithmetic.
You possibly can be taught extra about his work here and here.
Professor Tait joined the philosophy school at Chicago in 1972. Previous to that, he held positions on the College of Illinois at Chicago and Stanford College. He earned his PhD from Yale College and his BA from Lehigh College.
You possibly can learn his personal dialogue of his life and work here.
Professor Tait died on March fifteenth, 2024.
