Richard Montague
From Free net encyclopedia
Richard Merett Montague (1930–1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher. His research focused on the foundations of logic and set theory, and pioneered a logical approach to natural language semantics which became known as Montague grammar. This approach to language has been especially influential among certain computational linguists- perhaps more so than among more traditional philosophers of language.
He earned his Ph.D. in 1957 from University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Alfred Tarski, with a dissertation titled Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory. He spent his entire career teaching in UCLA's Philosophy department.
Montague was homosexual, and his violent death is believed to have resulted from "rough trade" with a stranger gone awry. The crime is unsolved to this day (Feferman and Feferman 2004, pages 301-303).
References
- Formal philosophy : selected papers of Richard Montague / ed. and with an introd. by Richmond H. Thomason. – New Haven : Yale Univ. Pr., 1974 (3. print 1979: ISBN 0-300-01527-5)
- Feferman, Anita and Solomon, 2004. Alfred Tarski: A Life. Cambridge Uni. Press.