Lars Svenonius (1927, Skellefteå - September 27, 2010, Silver Spring, Maryland) was a Swedish logician and philosopher.
He was a visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley in 1962-63, then held a position at the University of Chicago from 1963-69, and was professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland from 1969 to 2009. He retired in 2009, but was awarded the position of Emeritus Professor, and continued to teach courses and advise students until his death at 83 years of age.
He was the first Swedish logician to work on model theory with his dissertation Some problems in Model Theory (for which the University of Uppsala awarded him a doctorate in 1960). His early work was in formal logic, and he established a reputation for brilliance early in his career with a series of proofs, including an independent proof of equivalent characterizations of omega-categorical theories. A 1959 paper of his in Theoria establishes what is still referred to as the 'Svenonius theorem' on decidability. One of his key followers in Sweden was Per Lindström.[1]
Professor Lars Svenonius lived at home (in Hyattsville, Maryland) and commuted daily to work up until very shortly before his death .