(Nels) David Nelson, an American mathematician and logician, was born on January 2, 1918, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
His dissertation, entitled "Recursive Functions and Intuitionistic Number Theory," served as the capstone project for his doctorate.
He investigated the relationship, in intuitionistic formal systems, between a truth definition and the provability of formulas representing statements of number theory.
As a consequence, they demonstrated that certain classically true formulas are unverifiable in the intuitionistic predicate calculus with strong negation.
[4] David Nelson oversaw the dissertation work of the George Washington University student John Kent Minichiello, who authored "Negationless Intuitionistic Mathematics" in 1967.