William Hugh Woodin
| W. Hugh Woodin | |
|---|---|
Hugh Woodin in 1994
(photo by George Bergman) |
|
| Born |
April 23, 1955 Tucson, Arizona, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
University of California, Berkeley California Institute of Technology Harvard University |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert M. Solovay |
| Doctoral students |
Joan Bagaria James Cummings Joel David Hamkins Gregory Hjorth |
William Hugh Woodin (born April 23, 1955) is an American mathematician and set theorist at Harvard University. He has made many notable contributions to the theory of inner models and determinacy. A type of large cardinal, the Woodin cardinal, bears his name.
Born in Tucson, Arizona, Woodin earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 under Robert M. Solovay. His dissertation title was Discontinuous Homomorphisms of C(Omega) and Set Theory. He served as chair of the Berkeley mathematics department for the 2002–2003 academic year. Woodin is a managing editor of the Journal of Mathematical Logic. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.
He is the great-grandson of William Hartman Woodin, former Secretary of the Treasury.
He has done work on the theory of generic multiverses and the related concept of Ω-logic, which suggested an argument that the continuum hypothesis is either undecidable or false in the sense of mathematical platonism. Woodin criticizes this view arguing that it leads to a counterintuitive reduction in which all truths in the set theoretical universe can be decided from a small part of it. He claims that these and related mathematical results lead (intuitively) to the conclusion that Continuum Hypothesis has a truth value and the Platonistic approach is reasonable.
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