George Stephen Boolos (/ˈbuːloʊs/;[1] September 4, 1940 – May 27, 1996) was an American philosopher and a mathematical logician who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
in mathematics from Princeton University after completing a senior thesis, titled "A simple proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem", under the supervision of Raymond Smullyan.
A charismatic speaker well known for his clarity and wit, he once delivered a lecture (1994b) giving an account of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, employing only words of one syllable.
An expert on puzzles of all kinds, in 1993 Boolos reached the London Regional Final of The Times crossword competition.
Martin Löb showed Henkin's conjecture to be true, as well as identifying an important "reflection" principle also neatly codified using the modal logical approach.
David Lewis employed plural quantification in his Parts of Classes to derive a system in which Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory and the Peano axioms were all theorems.
While Boolos is usually credited with plural quantification, Peter Simons (1982) has argued that the essential idea can be found in the work of Stanislaw Leśniewski.