Dana Scott - Early Career

Early Career

He received his BA in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1954. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Convergent Sequences of Complete Theories under the supervision of Alonzo Church while at Princeton, and defended his thesis in 1958. Solomon Feferman (2005) writes of this period:

Scott began his studies in logic at Berkeley in the early 50s while still an undergraduate. His unusual abilities were soon recognized and he quickly moved on to graduate classes and seminars with Tarski and became part of the group that surrounded him, including me and Richard Montague; so it was at that time that we became friends. Scott was clearly in line to do a Ph. D. with Tarski, but they had a falling out for reasons explained in our biography. Upset by that, Scott left for Princeton where he finished with a Ph. D. under Alonzo Church. But it was not long before the relationship between them was mended to the point that Tarski could say to him, “I hope I can call you my student.

After completing his Ph.D. studies, he moved to the University of Chicago, working as an instructor there until 1960. In 1959, he published a joint paper with Michael O. Rabin, a colleague from Princeton, entitled Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem, which introduced the idea of nondeterministic machines to automata theory. This work led to the joint bestowal of the Turing Award on the two, for the introduction of this fundamental concept of computational complexity theory.

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