PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) — A leading mathematician who grew up in Brooklyn and won several of the world’s most prestigious math awards has died.
Paul Joseph Cohen died Friday of a rare lung disease, according to
Stanford University, where he taught for four decades. He was 72.Cohen’s honors were astonishing feats, considering that two prizes were from completely different branches of mathematics.
In 1964 he won the American Mathematical Society’s Bocher Prize for
analysis, and in 1966 he won the Fields Medal, the math world’s
equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for logic. Cohen also won the 1967
National Medal of Science for his work in logic, and he was an honorary
foreign member of the London Mathematical Society.Cohen’s passion was studying extremely difficult, long-standing
mathematical problems, such as the continuum hypothesis, which is
considered central to set theory, the idea that sets of items are the
fundamental objects defining all ideas in mathematics.He shocked the math establishment by proving that the continuum
hypothesis could not be decided. The notion that conventional
mathematics couldn’t prove or disprove concrete and well-known
assertions caused an uproar among academics.Cohen was born April 2, 1934, in Long Branch, N.J., the fourth and
youngest child of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His sister checked out
a library book on calculus for him when he was 9.He grew up in New York and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in
1950. He attended Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1953 but left before
receiving a bachelor’s degree, going directly to graduate school at the
University of Chicago, where he received a master’s degree in 1954 and
a doctorate in 1958.Cohen joined Stanford in 1961 as an assistant professor of
mathematics. He became a full professor in 1964. He retired in 2004 but
continued teaching until this quarter.Cohen played piano and violin and sang in a Stanford chorus and
Swedish folk group. He spoke English, Swedish, French, Spanish, German
and Yiddish.
