Logic List Mailing Archive

Kosta Dosen (1954-2017)

Yesterday, 21 October 2017, our dear friend and colleague Kosta Dosen 
passed away; losing his long struggle with cancer. He is survived by his 
daughter Ana. The service and funeral will take place at the New Cemetery 
in Belgrade on 24 October 2017, 12:00 (noon).

Born 1954 in Belgrade (Serbia), Kosta Dosen graduated from the University 
of Belgrade in 1977 and received a doctorate from the University of Oxford 
in 1981. He became a professor at the Mathematical Institute Belgrade in 
1982, was professor at the Department of Computer Science of the 
University of Toulouse (France) from 1994 to 1998, and held the Chair of 
Logic in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Belgrade since 
2003. He had visiting posts at universities including Notre Dame (USA), 
Montpellier (France) and Tuebingen (Germany).

Kosta Dosen's D.Phil. on "Logical Constants" was supervised by Michael 
Dummett and Dana Scott. As part of this, and in subsequent publications, 
he developed a proof-theoretic characterization of logical constants by 
means of so-called "double-line rules", which has become widely discussed 
since and is one of the major approaches in the debate on what logicality 
should mean. Working on the proof theory (and partly also model theory) of 
logics with restricted structural rules, he coined the term "substructural 
logic" at a conference in Tuebingen in 1990. However, the main topic of 
his intellectual life was the field of categorial proof theory that was 
opened up by Lambek, Lawvere and others. Kosta Dosen shaped the 
development of this field in many respects, in particular by his books on 
"Cut Elimination in Categories" and "Proof-Theoretical Coherence" (the 
latter together with Zoran Petric). He was a strong adherent and promotor 
of what Prawitz called "general proof theory", which is the study of 
proofs as objects in their own right rather than under the aspect of 
provability. This implied for him that the question of the identity of 
proofs was the central topic of general proof theory, where he was 
particularly interested in the relationship between normalization-based 
and generality-based approaches. In recent years he worked with great 
passion on Goedel's work including unpublished manuscripts in his 
Nachlass. A critical edition (together with Milos Adzic) of Goedel's Notre 
Dame course in logic has just appeared.

Kosta Dosen was a gifted and dedicated teacher, who was an inspiration to 
students and colleagues alike. His explanations will live on in the pages 
of his textbook on elementary logic (in Serbian).

A further, and more thorough discussion of Kosta Dosen's achievements will 
be published at a later stage.

Kosta will be greatly missed by relatives, friends and colleagues, and all 
who had the good fortune to know him.

-- 
Prof. Peter Schroeder-Heister
Department of Computer Science
University of Tuebingen
Sand 13
72076 Tuebingen
Germany
e-mail: psh@uni-tuebingen.de
http://ls.inf.uni-tuebingen.de


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