Logic List Mailing Archive

Alfred Horn (1918-2001)

--- === Source: ASL newsletter September 2001 === ---

Alfred Horn was born Feb 17, 1918, on the Lower East Side of NYC and died
on April 16, 2001. He earned his PhD at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1946 and came to UCLA in 1947, where he spent his entire
career until his retirement in 1988. Horn published 35 papers, mostly
in the areas of lattice theory and universal algebra. He was an algebraist
and a logician, with an uncanny talent to focus on fundamental notions
and problems. In a 1962 paper he formulated the so-called Horn Conjecture
in linear algebra that was proved in 1998 by a UCLA mathematician. In his
1951 paper, "On sentences which are true of direct unions of algebras", he
described Horn sentences and Horn clauses, which form the basis of logic
programming and earned him a permanent place in the mathematical and
computer science literature.