Encyclopedia > Paul Cohen

  Article Content

Paul Cohen

Paul Joseph Cohen is an American mathematician, born: April 2, 1934, Long Branch, New Jersey, USA.

He is noted for inventing a technique called forcing which he used to show that neither the continuum hypothesis nor the axiom of choice can be proved from the standard Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of set theory. In conjunction with the earlier work of Gödel, this showed that both these statements are independent of the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms: they can be neither proved nor disproved from these axioms. For his efforts he won the Fields Medal.

This result is possibly the most famous non-trivial example illustrating Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

External link:



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Lake Ronkonkoma, New York

... population are Hispanic or Latino of any race. There are 6,700 households out of which 35.6% have children under the age of 18 living with them, 59.8% are married ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 34.2 ms