Newton da Costa

Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa
Newton da Costa at Berkeley in 1973
Born	(1929-09-16) 16 September 1929 (age 87) Curitiba, Brazil
Fields	Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy and Philosophy of Science
Doctoral students	Jean-Yves Béziau Marcelo Samuel Berman Walter Carnielli Itala Maria Loffredo D'Ottaviano
Known for	Paraconsistent logic

Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa (born 16 September 1929 in Curitiba, Brazil) is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba and the title of his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation was Topological spaces and continuous functions.

Da Costa's international recognition came especially through his work on paraconsistent logic and its application to various fields such as philosophy, law, computing, and artificial intelligence. He is one of the founders of this non-classical logic. In addition, he constructed the theory of quasi-truth that constitutes a generalization of Alfred Tarski's theory of truth, and applied it to the foundations of science.

The scope of his research also includes model theory, generalized Galois theory, axiomatic foundations of quantum theory and relativity, complexity theory, and abstract logics. Da Costa has significantly contributed to the philosophy of logic, paraconsistent modal logics, ontology, and philosophy of science. He served as the President of the Brazilian Association of Logic and the Director of the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Sao Paulo. He received many awards and held numerous visiting scholarships at universities and centers of research in all continents.