Anil Nerode

Anil Nerode (born 1932) is an American mathematician, known for his work in mathematical logic and for his many-decades tenure as a professor at Cornell University.

He received his undergraduate education and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, the latter under the directions of Saunders Mac Lane.

[2] When in 1959 he got an unsolicited offer of a faculty position at Cornell University, he accepted, in part because on his previous visit to the campus he had thought "it was the prettiest place I'd ever seen".

[2] Nerode is Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics at Cornell, having been named to that chair in 1991.

With John Myhill, Nerode proved the Myhill–Nerode theorem specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for a formal language to be regular.