Joseph Goguen

Joseph Amadee Goguen (28 June 1941 – 3 July 2006) was an American computer scientist. He was professor of Computer Science at the University of California and Oxford University and held research positions at IBM and SRI International.

Goguen's work was one of the earliest approaches to the algebraic characterization of abstract data types and he originated and helped develop the OBJ family of programming languages.^[1][2] He was author of A Categorical Manifesto and founder^[3] and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. His development of institution theory impacted the field of universal logic.^[4][5] Standard implication in product fuzzy logic is often called "Goguen implication".^[6] "Goguen categories" are named after him.^{[7] [8]}

Education and academic career

Goguen received his Bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1963, and his PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968, where he was a student of the founder of fuzzy set theory Lotfi Zadeh.^[9]

He taught at UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago and University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a full professor of computer science.^[9][10][11] He held a Research Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences at the IBM Watson Research Center, where he organized the "ADJ" group.^[10] He also visited the University of Edinburgh in Scotland on three Senior Visiting Fellowships.^[3]

From 1979 to 1988, Goguen worked at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. From 1988 to 1996, he was a professor at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now the Oxford University Department of Computer Science) in England and a Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford.^[9] In 1996 he became professor of Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego.^[9]

Research areas

Goguen's research interests included category theory (a branch of mathematics), software engineering, fuzzy logic, algebraic semantics, user interface design, algebraic semiotics, and the social and ethical aspects of science and technology.

Lotfi Zadeh viewed Goguen's 1968 approach to “The Logic of Inexact Concepts” as seminal in the field of fuzzy logic.^[9] Goguen's PhD dissertation "Categories of fuzzy sets"^[12] was the first work to apply category theory to fuzzy logic, and led to "Goguen categories" named after him.^[7][8]

Goguen's research in the 1970s was one of the earliest approaches to the characterization of computational automata from a categorical perspective.^[1] Goguen's research with Thatcher, Wagner and Wright (also in the 1970s) was one of the earliest works to formalise the algebraic basis for data abstraction.^[2]

In the early 1990s Goguen and Burstall developed the theory of institutions, a category-theoretic description of logical systems in computer science.^[13] Institution theory impacted the development of universal logic and became one of its most studied aspects.^[14] The term "Carnapian Goguenism" is used to refer to the application of institutions to ontologies.^[15]

Goguen also studied the philosophy of computation and information, formal methods (especially hidden algebra and theorem proving), and relational and functional programming. He wrote a retrospective of his work and its context, Tossing Algebraic Flowers Down the Great Divide.^[16]

Personal views

Goguen was a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. Specifically, since the early 1970s he was a student of Chögyam Trungpa and, after his death in 1986, of his son Sakyong Mipham.^[3] During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was a faculty member of the science program at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Books

• Goguen, Joseph A., "Algebraic Semantics of Imperative Programs" ISBN 978-0262071727 MIT Press 1996
• Goguen, Joseph A., Malcolm, Grant "Software Engineering with OBJ" ISBN 978-1441949653 Springer 2000
• Kokichi Futatsugi et al. "Algebra, Meaning, and Computation: Essays dedicated to Joseph A. Goguen" ISBN 978-3540354628 Springer 2006

Selected Publications

• Goguen, J.A., "L-fuzzy sets". Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 18(1):145–174, 1967.
• Goguen, J.A., "The logic of inexact concepts". Synthese 19(3/4):325–373, 1969.
• Goguen, J.A., and J. Thatcher. "Initial algebra semantics". In Proceedings,Fifteenth Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory, pages 63{77. IEEE,1974.
• Goguen, J.A., J. Thatcher, and E. Wagner. "An initial algebra approach to the specication, correctness and implementation of abstract data types". In Raymond Yeh, editor, Current Trends in Programming Methodology, IV, pages 80–149. Prentice Hall, 1978.
• Goguen, J.A., A Categorical Manifesto. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, 1(1):49–67, 1991.
• Goguen, J.A. (editor), Art and the Brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(6/7), June/July 1999.

See also

• List of computer scientists

References

External links

• Home page
• Biographical information
• Publications
• Joseph Goguen's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
• Algebra, Meaning, and Computation. A Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Goguen
• Reviews of the first issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies ...there is no other journal quite like it, and one day we shall, I think, look back to its appearance as a defining moment...
• Photograph