Frederic Fitch

Frederic Brenton Fitch (September 9, 1908, Greenwich, Connecticut – September 18, 1987, New Haven, Connecticut) was an American logician, a Sterling Professor at Yale University.[1]

Frederic Fitch
BornSeptember 9, 1908
Greenwich, Connecticut, US
DiedSeptember 18, 1987
New Haven, Connecticut, US
Academic background
Alma materYale University
Academic work
Disciplinelogic

Education and career

At Yale, Fitch earned his B.A in 1931 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1934 under the supervision of F. S. C. Northrop.[2] From 1934 to 1937 Fitch was a postdoc at the University of Virginia. In 1937 he returned to Yale, where he taught until his retirement in 1977.[3]

His doctoral students include Alan Ross Anderson, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and William W. Tait.

Work

Fitch was the inventor of the Fitch-style calculus for arranging formal logical proofs as diagrams.[4] In his 1963 published paper "A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts" he proves "Theorem 5" (originally by Alonzo Church), which later became famous in context of the knowability paradox.[5]

Fitch worked primarily in combinatory logic, authoring an undergraduate-level textbook on the subject (1974), but he also made significant contributions to intuitionism and modal logic. He was interested in the problem of the consistency, completeness, categoricity, and constructivity of logical theories, especially nonclassical logics, and contributed to the foundations of mathematics and to inductive probability. He dealt with the theory of references in "The Problem of the Morning Star and the Evening Star" (1949).[3]

He also contributed to the philosophy of how logic relates to language.[3]

Works
  • 1952: Symbolic Logic, An Introduction, The Ronald Press Company[6]
  • 1963: "A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts", doi:10.2307/2271594 (This paper has over 400 citations.)
  • 1974: Elements of Combinatory Logic, Yale University Press[7]
  • 1975: (with Alan Ross Anderson, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and Richard Milton Martin): The Logical Enterprise. Yale University Press. 1975. ISBN 978-0-300-01790-8.

See also

References
  1. "Frederic B. Fitch", Obituaries, The New York Times, September 19, 1987.
  2. Frederic Fitch at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Anellis, Irving H. (1 January 2005). "Fitch, Frederic Brenton". In Shook, John R. (ed.). Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. A&C Black. pp. 799–802. ISBN 978-1-84371-037-0.
  4. Bimbó, Katalin (2014), Proof Theory: Sequent Calculi and Related Formalisms, Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, CRC Press, p. 272, ISBN 9781466564688.
  5. Fitch's Paradox of Knowability in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  6. Turquette, Atwell R. (1953). "Review of Symbolic Logic: An Introduction by Frederich Brenton Fitch". The Philosophical Review. 62 (4): 617–619. doi:10.2307/2182470. ISSN 0031-8108. JSTOR 2182470.
  7. Lercher, Bruce (2014). "Review of Elements of Combinatory Logic". Journal of Symbolic Logic. 41 (4): 789–790. doi:10.2307/2272401. ISSN 0022-4812. JSTOR 2272401. S2CID 60486915.
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