Ken Kunen

[Martin Davis]

 I was asked by Minna Dzamonja to convey to FOM subscribers the very sad
news of Ken Kunen's death on August 11 in Madison Wisconsin. He was 77
years old.

She also referred me to an online biography from which I have included
excerpts in this message:

Ken was born in New York City in 1943 and his undergraduate degree is from
Caltech. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1968, under the
direction of Dana Scott, and came to Wisconsin that same year. He was
quickly promoted to Associate Professor in 1970 and Full Professor in 1972.
Except for a year visiting the University of California, Berkeley, and two
years visiting the University of Texas, Austin, Ken has been in Madison
ever since, retiring in the Summer of 2008. Ken is survived by his wife Ann
and his two sons, Adam and Isaac. His many honors include an Alfred P.
Sloan Fellowship and H.I. Romnes Fellowship. Ken has been an editor for the
Annals of Mathematical Logic, the Journal of Symbolic Logic, the LMS
Journal of Computation and Mathematics, and the AMS Transactions. He, with
Jerry Vaughan, edited the influential Handbook of Set-Theoretic Topology.
Ken also edited the set theory section of the Handbook of Mathematical
Logic. Ken has given many  lectures in the US and throughout the world, and
he has helped to organize many mathematical conferences. In over 115
publications, Ken has contributed fundamental knowledge to set theory and
its applications to various areas of mathematics, such as set-theoretic
topology and measure theory. In addition he has worked on non-associative
algebraic systems and used computers to derive theorems. His seminal
textbook Set Theory. An Introduction to Independence Proofs has been an
influential force and inspiration to many graduate students and others
working in mathematical logic. Ken has been one of the central figures in
the UW Madison logic group. He directed the doctoral dissertations of over
25 graduate students, many of whom have supervised the doctoral
dissertations of  their own students. Ken was always generous with his
mathematical ideas, conjectures, and problems.

Ken was a popular teacher of both undergraduate and graduate courses with
an eloquent and incisive lecture style. His office has been full of model
polyhedra made over the years by the students in his  Geometry for
Elementary School Teachers class.

Martin
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