Richard Montague

Richard Montague
Richard Montague, at UCLA, c. 1967.
Born	September 20, 1930(1930-09-20) Stockton, California
Died	March 7, 1971(1971-03-07) (aged 40) Los Angeles
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics, philosophy
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Alfred Tarski
Doctoral students	Nino Cocchiarella Rudolf Grewe Hans Kamp

Richard Merett Montague (September 20, 1930 – March 7, 1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher.

Career

At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned an B.A. in Philosophy in 1950, an M.A. in Mathematics in 1953, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski. Montague, one of Tarski's most accomplished American students, spent his entire career teaching in the UCLA Department of Philosophy, where he supervised the dissertations of Nino Cocchiarella and Hans Kamp.

Montague wrote on the foundations of logic and set theory, as would befit a student of Tarski. His Ph.D. dissertation, titled Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory, contained the first proof that all possible axiomatizations of the standard axiomatic set theory ZFC must contain infinitely many axioms. In other words, ZFC cannot be finitely axiomatized.

He 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.

Montague was an accomplished organist and a successful real estate investor. He died violently in his own home; the crime is unsolved to this day. Feferman and Feferman argue that he usually went to bars "cruising" and bringing people home with him.^[1] On the day that he was murdered, he brought home several people "for some kind of soirée", but they instead robbed his house and strangled him.^[1]

His life and work provide the inspiration for the novel The Semantics of Murder (Aifric Campbell 2008: 250 ISBN 978-1852429966).

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

• Feferman, Anita, and Solomon Feferman, 2004. Alfred Tarski: A Life. Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Donald Kalish, and Montague, Richard, 1964. Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning. Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich.
• Montague, Richard, 1974. Formal philosophy : selected papers of Richard Montague / ed. and with an introd. by Richmond H. Thomason. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. (1979 printing: ISBN 0-300-01527-5)
• Partee, Barbara H., 2006, "Richard Montague (1930 - 1971)" in Brown, Keith, ed., Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 8, 2nd ed. Oxford: Elsevier: 255-57. Includes a bibliography of the secondary literature on Montague and his eponymous grammar.

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Feferman and Feferman 2004: 332-3

External links

• Richard Montague at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
• That’s Just Semantics! (or, the Proper Treatment of Richard Montague in Literary Fiction)

Persondata
Name	Montague, Richard
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 20, 1930
Place of birth	Stockton, California
Date of death	March 7, 1971
Place of death	Los Angeles