Cohen, Paul Joseph
COHEN, PAUL JOSEPH
COHEN, PAUL JOSEPH (1934– ), U.S. mathematician. Born in New Jersey, Cohen was a student at Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1953 and he received his M.Sc. in 1954 and his Ph.D in 1958 from the University of Chicago. From 1959 to 1961 he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and in 1961 he was appointed to the faculty at Stanford University. In 1964 became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. At the same time Cohen received the Bocher Memorial Prize from the American Mathematical Society, and in 1966 Cohen was awarded the Fields Medal for his fundamental work on the foundations of set theory. Cohen used a technique called "forcing" to prove the independence in set theory of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum hypothesis. Cohen's main interests were set theory, harmonic analysis, and partial differential equations. He wrote Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966).
[Bracha Rager (2nd ed.)]