Editing Stephen Cole Kleene (section)

==Biography==
Kleene was awarded a bachelor's degree from [[Amherst College]] in 1930. He was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics from [[Princeton University]] in 1934, where his thesis, entitled ''A Theory of Positive Integers in Formal Logic'', was supervised by [[Alonzo Church]]. In the 1930s, he did important work on Church's [[lambda calculus]]. In 1935, he joined the mathematics department at the [[University of Wisconsin–Madison]], where he spent nearly all of his career. After two years as an instructor, he was appointed assistant professor in 1937.

While a visiting scholar at the [[Institute for Advanced Study]] in Princeton, 1939–1940, he laid the foundation for [[recursion theory]], an area that would be his lifelong research interest. In 1941, he returned to Amherst College, where he spent one year as an associate professor of mathematics.

During [[World War II]], Kleene was a [[Lieutenant commander (United States)|lieutenant commander]] in the [[United States Navy]]. He was an instructor of navigation at the U.S. Naval Reserve's Midshipmen's School in [[New York (state)|New York]], and then a project director at the [[Naval Research Laboratory]] in [[Washington, D.C.]]

In 1946, Kleene returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, becoming a full professor in 1948 and the Cyrus C. MacDuffee professor of mathematics in 1964. He served two terms as the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and one term as the Chair of the Department of Numerical Analysis (later renamed the Department of Computer Science). He also served as Dean of the College of Letters and Science in 1969–1974. During his years at the University of Wisconsin he was thesis advisor to 13 Ph.D. students. He retired from the University of Wisconsin in 1979. In 1999 the mathematics library at the University of Wisconsin was renamed in his honor.<ref>{{cite web |title=S. C. Kleene |url=https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kleene/ |access-date=February 8, 2021}}</ref>

Kleene's teaching at Wisconsin resulted in three texts in [[mathematical logic]], Kleene (1952, 1967) and Kleene and Vesley (1965). The first two are often cited and still in print. Kleene (1952) wrote alternative proofs to the [[Gödel's incompleteness theorems]] that enhanced their canonical status and made them easier to teach and understand. Kleene and Vesley (1965) is the classic American introduction to [[intuitionistic logic]] and mathematical [[intuitionism]].

{{blockquote|[...] recursive function theory is of central importance in computer science. Kleene is responsible for many of the fundamental results in the area, including the Kleene normal form theorem (1936), the Kleene recursive theorem (1938), the development of the arithmetical and hyper-arithmetical hierarchies in the 1940s and 1950s, the Kleene-Post theory of degrees of unsolvability (1954), and higher-type recursion theory. which he began in the late 1950s and returned to in the late 1970s. [...] Beginning in the late 1940s, Kleene also worked in a second area, Brouwer's intuitionism. Using tools from recursion theory, he introduced recursive realizability, an important technique for interpreting intuitionistic statements. In the summer of 1951 at the [[Rand Corporation]], he produced a major breakthrough in a third area when he gave an important characterization of events accepted by a [[finite automaton]].<ref>{{cite journal |author-last=Keisler |author-first=H. Jerome |author-link=H. Jerome Keisler |title=Stephen Cole Kleene 1909–1994 |journal=Notices of the AMS |date=September 1994 |volume=41 |issue=7 |page=792}}</ref>}}

Kleene served as president of the [[Association for Symbolic Logic]], 1956–1958, and of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science,<ref>
[http://www.icsu.org/publicdb/frmDisplayMember?docid=97d44bb2b86ba6e145872f68db2d0d62 IUHPS website]; also known as "International Union of the History and the Philosophy of Science". A member of [http://www.icsu.org/ ICSU], the International Council for Science ([http://www.icsu.org/about-icsu/about-us/a-brief-history formerly named] International Council of Scientific Unions).</ref> 1961. The importance of Kleene's work led to [[Daniel Dennett]] coining the saying, published in 1978, that "Kleeneness is next to Gödelness."<ref>Daniel Dennett and Karel Lambert, "kleene", in ''The Philosophical Lexicon'', 7th ed. (Newark, DE: American Philosophical Association, 1978), 5; and ''Hyperborea'' (blogger pseudonym), "Dennett's Logocentric Lexicon" (9 December 2007): http://aeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dennetts-logocentric-lexicon.html</ref> In 1990, he was awarded the [[National Medal of Science]].

Kleene and his wife Nancy Elliott had four children. He had a lifelong devotion to the family farm in Maine. An avid mountain climber, he had a strong interest in nature and the [[environment (biophysical)|environment]], and was active in many [[conservation movement|conservation]] causes.