Rohit Jivanlal Parikh (born November 20, 1936 in Palanpur

Palanpur

Palanpur is a city and a municipality of Banaskantha district in the Indian state of Gujarat. Palanpur is the largest city and the administrative headquarters of the district....

, Gujarat, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

), is a mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory

Recursion theory

Computability theory, also called recursion theory, is a branch of mathematical logic that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees. The field has grown to include the study of generalized computability and definability...

 and proof theory

Proof theory

Proof theory is a branch of mathematical logic that represents proofs as formal mathematical objects, facilitating their analysis by mathematical techniques. Proofs are typically presented as inductively-defined data structures such as plain lists, boxed lists, or trees, which are constructed...

. His catholic attitude towards logic has led to work on topics like vagueness

Vagueness

The term vagueness denotes a property of concepts . A concept is vague:* if the concept's extension is unclear;* if there are objects which one cannot say with certainty whether belong to a group of objects which are identified with this concept or which exhibit characteristics that have this...

, ultrafinitism

Ultrafinitism

In the philosophy of mathematics, ultrafinitism, also known as ultraintuitionism, strict-finitism, actualism, and strong-finitism is a form of finitism. There are various philosophies of mathematics which are called ultrafinitism...

, belief revision

Belief revision

Belief revision is the process of changing beliefs to take into account a new piece of information. The logical formalization of belief revision is researched in philosophy, in databases, and in artificial intelligence for the design of rational agents....

,
logic of knowledge, game theory

Game theory

Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

 and social software (social procedure). This last area seeks to combine techniques from logic, computer science (especially logic of programs) and game theory to understand the structure of social algorithms. Examples of such are election

Election

An election is a formal decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy operates since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the...

s, transport systems

Public transport

Public transport is a shared passenger transportation service which is available for use by the general public, as distinct from modes such as taxicab, car pooling or hired buses which are not shared by strangers without private arrangement.Public transport modes include buses, trolleybuses, trams...

, lecture

Lecture

thumb|A lecture on [[linear algebra]] at the [[Helsinki University of Technology]]A lecture is an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject, for example by a university or college teacher. Lectures are used to convey critical information, history,...

s, conferences

Academic conference

An academic conference or symposium is a conference for researchers to present and discuss their work. Together with academic or scientific journals, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers.-Overview:Conferences are usually composed of various...

, and monetary systems

Monetary system

A monetary system is anything that is accepted as a standard of value and measure of wealth in a particular region.However, the current trend is to use international trade and investment to alter the policy and legislation of individual governments. The best recent example of this policy is the...

, all of which have properties of interest to those who are logically inclined.

Rohit Parikh was married to Carol Parikh (nee Geris) from 1968 to 1994. Carol is best known for her prize winning stories and for her influential biography of Oscar Zariski

Oscar Zariski

Oscar Zariski was a Russian mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.-Education:...

, The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski. They have two children, Vikram (born 1969) and Uma (born 1974).

Vision statement

I think it is a scandal that Russell’s paradox

Russell's paradox

In the foundations of mathematics, Russell's paradox , discovered by Bertrand Russell in 1901, showed that the naive set theory created by Georg Cantor leads to a contradiction...

 is still effectively unsolved after a hundred years. We do not need to worry about large cardinals, but need instead to worry about the fact that our notion of set is conceptually deficient. Apart from this I believe that both logic and philosophy are in a state of cowardly subservience to science, which is true as far as it goes, but whose language is severely limited, unable to analyze propositional attitudes

Propositional attitude

A propositional attitude is a relational mental state connecting a person to a proposition. They are often assumed to be the simplest components of thought and can express meanings or content that can be true or false...

, or the game theoretic

Game theory

Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

 notion of agent

Agent (economics)

In economics, an agent is an actor and decision maker in a model. Typically, every agent makes decisions by solving a well or ill defined optimization/choice problem. The term agent can also be seen as equivalent to player in game theory....

. This subservience leaves us in a state of smug satisfaction, but leaves fundamental problems unaddressed. I would suggest that people pay more attention to Zeno’s paradoxes

Zeno's paradoxes

Zeno's paradoxes are a set of problems generally thought to have been devised by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides's doctrine that "all is one" and that, contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is...

, to McTaggart's

J. M. E. McTaggart

John McTaggart was an idealist metaphysician. For most of his life McTaggart was a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an exponent of the philosophy of Hegel and among the most notable of the British idealists.-Personal life:J. M. E. McTaggart was born in 1866...

 paper on Time

The Unreality of Time

The Unreality of Time is the best-known philosophical work of the Cambridge idealist J. M. E. McTaggart. In the paper, first published in 1908 in Mind 17: 457-73, McTaggart argues that time is unreal because our descriptions of time are either contradictory, circular, or insufficient...

, and perhaps also to the writings of the thirteenth-century Zen teacher Dogen Zenji

Dogen

Dōgen Zenji was a Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher born in Kyōto, and the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan after travelling to China and training under the Chinese Caodong lineage there...

in his Genjokoan.

Posts

• Editor, International Journal of the Foundations of Computer Science, 1990-1995
• Editor, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2000-2003

Awards and recognition

• William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition Prize Winner, 1955, 1956, 1957
• Gibbs Prize, Bombay University, 1954

Academic and research appointments

• Distinguished Professor, City University of New York, (Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center), 1982–Present
• Professor, Mathematics, Boston University, 1972-1982
• Visiting Professor, Mathematics, Courant Institute, 1981
• Associate Professor,Mathematics, Boston University, 1967-1972
• Visiting Associate Professor, Mathematics, SUNY at Buffalo, 1971-1972
• Lecturer, Bristol University, 1965-1967
• Reader, Panjab University, 1964-1965
• Instructor, Stanford University 1961-1963
• Visiting Appointments at Stanford, TIFR Bombay, ETH Zurich, and Caltech

Main publications

• On Context Free Languages, Journal of the Assoc. Comp. Mach. 13 (1966) 570-81. Originally published in 1961 as a research report at RLE, MIT.
• Existence and Feasibility in Arithmetic, Jour. Symbolic Logic 36 (1971) 494-508.
• On the Length of Proofs, Transactions of the Amer. Math. Soc. 177 (1973) 29-36.
• (With M. Parnes) Conditional Probability can be Defined for Arbitrary Pairs of Sets of Reals, Advances in Math 9 (1972) 520- 522.
• (With D.H.J. de Jongh) Well Partial Orderings and Hierarchies, Proc. Kon. Ned. Akad. Sci Series A 80 (1977) 195- 207.
• (With D. Kozen) An Elementary Completeness Proof for PDL Theoretical Computer Science 14 (1981) 113-118.
• The Problem of Vague Predicates, in Logic, Language and Method Ed. Cohen and Wartofsky, Reidel (1982) 241-261.
• The Logic of Games and its Applications, Annals of Discrete Math., 24 (1985) 111-140.
• (With R. Ramanujam) Distributed Processing and the Logic of Knowledge, in Logics of Programs, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 193 pp. 256-268.
• Communication, Consensus and Knowledge, (with P. Krasucki), Jour. Economic Theory 52 (1990) pp. 178-189.
• Knowledge and the Problem of Logical Omniscience ISMIS- 87 (International Symp. on Methodology for Intelligent Systems), North Holland (1987) pp. 432-439.
• Finite and Infinite Dialogues, in the Proceedings of a Workshop on Logic from Computer Science, Ed. Moschovakis, MSRI publications, Springer 1991 pp. 481-498.
• Vagueness and Utility: the Semantics of Common Nouns in Linguistics and Philosophy 17 1994, 521-35.
• Topological Reasoning and The Logic of Knowledge (with Dabrowski and Moss) Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 78 (1996) 73-110.
• Belief revision and language splitting, in Proc. Logic, Language and Computation, Ed. Moss, Ginzburg and de Rijke, CSLI 1999, pp. 266-278 (earlier version appeared in 1996 in the preliminary proceedings).
• (with Samir Chopra), Relevance Sensitive Belief Structures, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 28(1-4): 259-285 (2000).
• Social Software, Synthese, 132, Sep 2002, 187-211.
• (with Jouko Vaananen), Finite information logic, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 134 (2005) 83-93.
• (With R. Ramanujam), A Knowledge based Semantics of Messages, Jour. Logic, Language and Information, 12 2003, 453-467.
• Levels of Knowledge, Games, and Group Action, Research in Economics, 57 2003, 267-281.
• (with Eric Pacuit and Eva Cogan) The logic of knowledge based obligation, in Knowledge, Rationality and Action, 2006. Work in Progress.
• Currently working on books in reasoning about knowledge as well as on social software. Also, working on the issue of logical omniscience.