Larry Wos

Lawrence T. Wos (1930–2020) was an American mathematician, a researcher in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory.[1]

Larry Wos
Born
Lawrence T. Wos

1930
Chicago
Died(2020-08-21)August 21, 2020
Known forTheorem proving
AwardsHerbrand Award (1992)
Scientific career
ThesisOn Commutative Prime Power Subgroups of the Norm (1957)

Biography

Wos studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1950 and a master's in mathematics in 1954, and went on for doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received PhD in 1957 supervised by Reinhold Baer.[2] He joined the Argonne in 1957, and began using computers to prove mathematical theorems in 1963.[3][4]

Wos was congenitally blind. He was an avid bowler, the best male blind bowler in the US.[5][6][7]

Awards and honors

In 1982, Wos and his colleague Steve Winker were the first to win the Automated Theorem Proving Prize, given by the American Mathematical Society.[5] In 1992, Wos was the first to win the Herbrand Award for his contributions to the field of automated deduction.[8] A festschrift in his honor, Automated reasoning and its applications: essays in honor of Larry Wos (Robert Veroff, ed.) was published by the MIT Press in 1997 (ISBN 0-262-22055-5).

Books

Wos and Gail W. Pieper are the coauthors of the books A Fascinating Country in the World of Computing: Your Guide to Automated Reasoning (World Scientific, 1999, ISBN 978-981-02-3910-7) and Automated Reasoning and the Discovery of Missing and Elegant Proofs (Rinton Press, 2003, ISBN 1-58949-023-1). Wos's collected works were published by World Scientific in 2000, in two volumes (ISBN 978-981-02-4001-1).

References
  1. Larry Wos's home page at Argonne, retrieved 2010-10-03.
  2. Larry Wos at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Obermiller, Tim Andrew (April 1997), "Top of his game", University of Chicago Magazine.
  4. Dick, Stephanie (September 2011). "AfterMath: The Work of Proof in the Age of Human–Machine Collaboration". Isis. University of Chicago Press. 102 (3): 494–505. doi:10.1086/661623. JSTOR 10.1086/661623. PMID 22073773. S2CID 24778586.
  5. Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1982.
  6. Van, Jon (January 24, 1982), "Blindness took back seat on road to success", Chicago Tribune.
  7. Montgomery, Paul L. (May 27, 1977), "Blind Mathematician Applies Analytical Method to Bowling", New York Times.
  8. Deepak Kapur (1992), Automated deduction, CADE-11: 11th International Conference on Automated Deduction


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