Hao Wang (academic)

Hao Wang
Born	20 May 1921 Qihe, Shandong, China
Died	13 May 1995 New York City, New York, USA
Fields	Mathematics, philosophy, computer science
Institutions	Harvard University, Oxford University, Rockefeller University
Alma mater	National Southwestern Associated University, Tsinghua University, Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Willard Quine
Doctoral students	Stephen Cook, Shimon Even, Joyce Friedman
Known for	Wang tiles

Hao Wang (Chinese: 王浩; pinyin: Wáng Hào; 20 May 1921 – 13 May 1995) was a Chinese American logician, philosopher and mathematician.

Biography

Born in Jinan, Shandong, in the Republic of China (today in the People's Republic of China), Wang received his early education in China. He obtained a B.Sc. degree in mathematics from the National Southwestern Associated University in 1943 and an M.A. in Philosophy from Tsinghua University in 1945, where his teachers included Feng Youlan and Jin Yuelin, after which he moved to the United States for further graduate studies. He studied logic at Harvard University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. He was appointed to an assistant professorship at Harvard the same year.

During the early 1950s, Wang studied with Paul Bernays in Zurich. In 1956, he was appointed Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics at Oxford University. In 1959, Wang wrote on an IBM704 computer a program that in only 9 minutes mechanically proved several hundred mathematical logic theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.^[1] In 1961, he was appointed Gordon Mckay Professor of Mathematical Logic and Applied Mathematics at Harvard.^[2] From 1967 until 1991, he headed the logic research group at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he was professor of logic. In 1972, Wang joined in a group of Chinese American scientists led by Chih-Kung Jen as the first such delegation from the U.S. to the People's Republic of China.

One of Wang's most important contributions was the Wang tile.^[3] He showed that any Turing machine can be turned into a set of Wang tiles. The first noted example of aperiodic tiling is a set of Wang tiles, whose nonexistence Wang had once conjectured, discovered by his student Robert Berger in 1966. A philosopher in his own right,^[4] Wang also developed a penetrating interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mathematics, which he called "anthropologism." He chronicled Kurt Gödel's philosophical ideas and authored several books on the subject,^[5] thereby providing contemporary scholars an inestimable resource for Gödel's later philosophical thought.

In 1983 he was presented with the first Milestone Prize for Automated Theorem-Proving, sponsored by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.^[6]

Books

• A Survey of Mathematical Logic. Peking: Science Press; Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1962. [Wang 1962a].
• From Mathematics to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. [Wang 1974a].
• Popular Lectures on Mathematical Logic. New York: Van Nostrand, 1981. [Wang 1981a]. ISBN 0-486-67632-3.
• Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice to What We Know. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. [Wang 1985a]. ISBN 0-262-23124-7.
• Reflections on Kurt Gödel. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. [Wang 1987a]. ISBN 0-262-73087-1.
• Computation, Logic, Philosophy. A Collection of Essays. Beijing: Science Press; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990. [Wang 1990a]. ISBN 7-03000211-3.
• A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. [Wang 1996a]. ISBN 0-262-23189-1.

See also

• Wang B-machine

References

1. Wang, Hao (1960), "Toward Mechanical Mathematics", IBM Journal of Research and Development 4 (1): 2–22, doi:10.1147/rd.41.0002 [Wang 1960a].
2. http://lewis.seas.harvard.edu/biocv
3. [Wang 1960a].
4. [Wang 1974 and 1985a]
5. [Wang 1996a, 1987a, and in 1974a].
6. Loveland, Donald W.; Bledsoe, W. W. (1984). Automated theorem proving: after 25 years. Providence, Rhode Island: American Mathematical Society. p. 47. ISBN 0-8218-5027-X.

External links

• Hao Wang at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Obituary from The New York Times.

Detailed bibliography of Hao Wang's writings

Detailed bibliography

• "A Bibliography of Hao Wang" from Philosophia Mathematica. References in square brackets are to this source.