George Kreisel

Georg Kreisel FRS (September 15, 1923 – March 1, 2015) was an Austrian-born mathematical logician who studied and worked in Great Britain and America.

Kreisel was born in Graz and came from a Jewish background; his family sent him to the United Kingdom before the Anschluss, where he studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then, during World War II, worked on military subjects. Kreisel never took a Ph.D., though in 1962 he was awarded the Cambridge degree of Sc.D., a `higher doctorate' given on the basis of published research. He taught at the University of Reading from 1949 until 1954 and then worked at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1955 to 1957. He returned to Reading in 1957, but then taught at Stanford University from 1958-1959. Then back at Reading for the year 1959-1960, and then the University of Paris 1960-1962. Kreisel was appointed a professor at Stanford University in 1962 and remained on the faculty there until he retired in 1985.

Kreisel worked in various areas of logic, and especially in proof theory, where he is known for his so-called "unwinding" program, whose aim was to extract constructive content from superficially non-constructive proofs.

Kreisel was elected to the Royal Society in 1966; Kreisel remained a close friend of Francis Crick whom he had met in the Royal Navy during WWII.

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