Life
Curry was born on September 12, 1900, in Millis, Massachusetts, to Samuel Silas Curry and Anna Baright Curry, who ran a school for elocution. He entered Harvard University in 1916 to study medicine but switched to mathematics before graduating in 1920. After two years of graduate work in electrical engineering at MIT, he returned to Harvard to study physics, earning a MA in 1924. Curry's interest in mathematical logic started during this period when he was introduced to the Principia Mathematica, the attempt by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell to ground mathematics in symbolic logic. Remaining at Harvard, Curry pursued a Ph.D. in mathematics. While he was directed by George Birkhoff to work on differential equations, his interests continued to shift to logic. In 1927, while an instructor at Princeton University, he discovered the work of Moses Schönfinkel in combinatory logic. Schönfinkel's work had anticipated much of Curry's own research, and as a consequence, he moved to Göttingen where he could work with Heinrich Behmann and Paul Bernays, who were familiar with Schönfinkel's work. Curry was supervised by David Hilbert and worked closely with Bernays, receiving a Ph.D. in 1930 with a dissertation on combinatory logic.
In 1928, before leaving for Göttingen, Curry married Mary Virginia Wheatley. The couple lived in Germany while Curry completed his dissertation, then, in 1929, moved to State College, Pennsylvania where Curry accepted a position at Penn State College. They had two children, Anne Wright Curry (July 27, 1930) and Robert Wheatley Curry (July 6, 1934). Curry remained at Penn State for the next 37 years. He spent one year at University of Chicago in 1931–32 under a National Research Fellowship and one year in 1938–39 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1942 he took a leave of absence to do applied mathematics for the US government during World War II. Immediately after the war he worked on the ENIAC project, in 1945 and 1946. Under a Fulbright fellowship, he collaborated with Robert Feys in Louvain, Belgium. After retiring from Penn State in 1966, Curry accepted a position at the University of Amsterdam. In 1970, after finishing the second volume of his treatise on the combinatory logic, Curry retired from the University of Amsterdam and returned to State College, Pennsylvania.
Haskell Curry died on September 1, 1982 in State College, Pennsylvania.
Read more about this topic: Haskell Curry
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“You must not eat with it anything leavened. For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread with it -the bread of affliction -because you came out of the land of Egypt in great haste, so that all the days of your life you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 16:3.
“Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it self is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Faeroe, no more than without Sense.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.”
—Julie Burchill (b. 1960)