John Myhill
| John Myhill | |
|---|---|
| Born |
11 August 1923 Birmingham, United Kingdom |
| Died | 15 February 1987 (aged 63) |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Thesis | A Semantically Complete Foundation for Logic and Mathematics (1949) |
| Doctoral advisor |
Willard Van Orman Quine Lynn Harold Loomis |
| Doctoral students |
Erik Ellentuck Andre Scedrov |
| Spouse | Akiko Kino (died 1983) |
| Children | John (born 1957), Robert (born 1960), Phoebe (born 1963), Nova (born 1970) |
John R. Myhill, Sr. (11 August 1923 – 15 February 1987) was a British mathematician.
Myhill received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Willard Van Orman Quine in 1949. He was professor at SUNY Buffalo from 1966 until his death in 1987. He also taught at several other universities.
His son, also called John Myhill, is a professor of linguistics in the English department of the University of Haifa in Israel.
In the theory of formal languages, the Myhill–Nerode theorem, proven by Myhill with Anil Nerode, characterizes the regular languages as the languages that have only finitely many inequivalent prefixes.
In computability theory, the Rice–Myhill–Shapiro theorem, more commonly known as Rice's theorem, states that, for any nontrivial property P of partial functions, it is undecidable to determine whether a given Turing machine computes a function with property P. The Myhill isomorphism theorem is a computability-theoretic analogue of the Cantor–Bernstein–Schroeder theorem that characterizes the recursive isomorphisms of pairs of sets.
In the theory of cellular automata, Myhill is known for proving (along with E. F. Moore) the Garden of Eden theorem, stating that a cellular automaton has a configuration with no predecessor if and only if it has two different asymptotic configurations which evolve to the same configuration. He is also known for posing the firing squad synchronization problem of designing an automaton that, starting from a single non-quiescent cell, evolves to a configuration in which all cells reach the same non-quiescent state at the same time; this problem was again solved by Moore.
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