Ken Kunen

[Harvey Friedman]

I was shocked and saddened to hear about Ken about an hour ago on the
FOM thanks to Minna Dzamonja conveyed by Martin Davis. I first met Ken
when he was finishing up as a graduate student at Stanford University
when I arrived there in 1967. He had immense technical power already
then at a level that was competing with the world's leading set
theorists. In addition to establishing striking new results about
measurable cardinals using the iterated ultrapower technique, soon
later he established his legendary refutation of the large cardinal
hypothesis that was so prominently positioned at the top of the
crucially important development of elementary embeddings spearheaded
by Scott, Solovay, and Reinhardt.This Kunen Inconsistency is
definitely one of the few most shocking developments in the whole of
mathematical logic. There is a splendid thorough account of Ken's work
by Aki Kanamori in Topology and its Applications, Volume 158, Issue
18, 1 December 2011, pages 2446-2459.

Harvey Friedman

On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 5:18 PM Martin Davis
<martin.david.davis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  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