Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Department Member, Institute for American Thought

Visiting Resrarch Associate

About

I am an historian of logic and was a student of historian of logic Jean van Heijenoort.

My research has centered on the work of Bertrand Russell in set theory and logic and of Charles Peirce in algebra and algebraic logic; on the history of proof theory, with special reference to the roles of the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and Herbrand’s Fundamental Theorem; and the history of logic and mathematics in Russia.

I last taught P365: Intermediate Symbolic Logic and P590: Advanced Symbolic Logic at IUPUI during the Fall 2009 semester.

I am now working on a manuscript of Charles Peirce dating from ca. 1890 in which he deals with what we have since come to know as Hilbert’s Ninth and Tenth Problems. I have also recently resumed work, begun a decade ago, on an historiographical-philosophical-sociological study, “From Algebraic Logic to Logistic”, of the so-called “Fregean revolution”, the shift from the algebraic style of logic of Boole-De Morgan-Peirce-Schröder in the late nineteenth century to the function-theoretic, extensional logic of Frege and Russell-Whitehead as the canonical style of mathematical logic of the twentieth century.

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