In celebration of Dana Scott
The greatest privilege of working at Topos is being part of a community of incredible people. One of these people is Dana Scott. Dana’s research achievements need little introduction: his ideas have changed our understanding of computing and logic, and have been recognised with numerous awards, including the 1976 Turing Award. It’s an honour to celebrate Dana’s 90th birthday with him this coming Tuesday. We’ll be hosting a special seminar in his honour, with Gordon Plotkin delivering a talk titled “Does recursion help?” at 17:00UTC (10am in Berkeley), on a question in typed lambda calculus that can be resolved, like so many questions, using Dana’s domain theory.
The greatest privilege of working at Topos is being part of a community of incredible people. One of these people is Dana Scott. Dana’s research achievements need little introduction, with just some of his seminal contributions including the introduction of nondeterministic automata, new semantics for modal logic, a new proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis via Boolean-valued models, and of course domain theory and denotational semantics of programming languages. These ideas have changed our understanding of computing and logic, and have been recognised with numerous awards, including the 1976 Turing Award. Among other links, Dana’s recent interview with Gordon Plotkin in the Communications of the ACM contains stories of both Dana’s work and life.
Here I also want to emphasise Dana’s generosity. Dana was one of the first people David Spivak and I spoke to about Topos, back in 2019, when Topos was not much more than a name and a dream. Dana immediately saw the potential of category theory and related fields to shape systems and technology, and the need for new institutions that can help ensure this power benefits the public. He has been a treasured, insightful advisor ever since, always bringing new ideas, opportunities, and people to Topos.
Dana loves teaching, and this past summer volunteered his time to teach two graduate students, Anthony Agwu and Harrison Grodin, in residence at Topos — meeting them almost daily to share his knowledge and patiently answer question after question, as well as taking the time to mentor other summer research assistants in the cohort. Earlier this year, he also donated his personal collection of category theory books to Topos to begin our library. Our library is slowly growing, and we’ve designated these initial books as the Dana Scott collection.
Born here in Berkeley, it’s truly an honour to celebrate Dana’s 90th birthday with him this coming Tuesday. We’ll be hosting a special seminar in his honour, with Gordon Plotkin delivering a talk titled “Does recursion help?” at 17:00UTC (10am in Berkeley), on a question in typed lambda calculus that can be resolved, like so many questions, using Dana’s domain theory. For an abstract and further details, including how to join us in person or over zoom, see our Berkeley seminar website.
A livestream (which will persist as a recording, after the event) will be available here:
Happy 90th birthday Dana, and thank you for all that you’ve given us.