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APA News Announcements

K. Jon Barwise Memorial

Jon Barwise received his B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from Yale University in 1963. He received a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1967 from Stanford University, where he wrote his dissertation under Professor Solomon Feferman of Stanford. He also studied with Professor Dana Scott, now at Carnegie Mellon University, and Professor Georg Kreisel. In 1992 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

Barwise was College Professor of Philosophy, Computer Science, and Mathematics at Indiana University. He joined the faculty at Indiana University in 1990. Between 1983 and 1990, he was a professor of philosophy at Stanford, where he was a co-founder and first director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, and the first director of the Symbolic Systems Program.

Throughout his prolific career, Barwise sought to develop a better theoretical understanding of information content: how it is expressed in language, computers, or graphical representations, and how it is transferred from one form of representation to another. His first book, Admissible Sets and Structures (1975), developed the theory of admissible sets, and applied it to definability theory, a branch of logic devoted to the precise study of the expressive power of formal languages (for example, mathematical languages). The techniques he pioneered in this work are still being applied and extended today.

In a recent research monograph, Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems (1997), coauthored with Jerry Seligman, Barwise proposed a theory of how information flows through complex systems as diverse as computers and natural languages. Central to this theory is the notion of an information channel, capable of preserving information as it is transmitted through a complex, causally interacting system.

In addition to his substantial research contributions, Barwise was deeply committed to the teaching of logic. With John Etchemendy, he developed numerous pieces of innovative courseware to help convey abstract concepts in logic. These were published with a series of textbooks, including The Language of First-order Logic (1990), Tarski’s World (1991), Turing’s World (1993), Hyperproof (1994), and Language, Proof and Logic (2000).

In 1997, Barwise and Etchemendy shared the EDUCOM Medal for their contribution to logic pedagogy. In his obituary, Etchemendy notes that "Jon always said that he considered his most important contribution to logic to be his development of new teaching techniques and methods."

Robert Cavalier
Chair, APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers
Department of Philosophy
Carnegie Mellon University