William Werner Boone (16 January 1920 in Cincinnati – 14 September 1983 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American mathematician.

He completed his undergrad degree as a part time student at the University of Cincinnati.

[1] Alonzo Church was his Ph.D. advisor at Princeton, and Kurt Gödel was his friend at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Pyotr Novikov showed in 1955 that there exists a finitely presented group G such that the word problem for G is undecidable.

[2] A different proof was obtained by Boone in a paper published in 1958.