Kochen was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and escaped the Nazis with his family, thanks to a courageous Norwegian ship captain.
He moved to the US afterwards and received his Ph.D. (Ultrafiltered Products and Arithmetical Extensions) from Princeton University in 1958 under the direction of Alonzo Church.
[2] In 1967 he was awarded, together with James Ax, the seventh Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory for a series of three joint papers[3][4][5] on Diophantine problems involving p-adic techniques.
Kochen and Ax also co-authored the Ax–Kochen theorem, an application of model theory to algebra.
The theorem states that if we have a certain amount of free will, then, subject to certain assumptions, so must some elementary particles.