Name Carew Meredith Role Mathematics educator | Died March 31, 1976 | |
Education Trinity College, Cambridge | ||
Carew Arthur Meredith (generally "C. A. Meredith" on publications) (July 28, 1904 – March 31, 1976) was an influential Irish logician, appointed to Trinity College, Dublin in 1947. His work on condensed detachment (inspired by the work of Łukasiewicz) was under-appreciated in his own time, but is influential in modern research.
He also proved the shortest known axiomatic bases for a number of logic systems. His achievements in that area were unsurpassed until automated theorem provers in the last few years, which build on his work, proved some shorter ones for some systems and proved his shortest for others. Notably, Stephen Wolfram built on Meredith's work to produce the shortest known single axiom equivalent to the axioms of propositional calculus.
Born July 28, 1904 into a distinguished Dublin family, he was the son of barrister Arthur Francis Carew Meredith K.C. (1862 — May 16, 1938), whose opinions were sought by Éamon de Valera in drafting the constitution of the Irish Republic (1919–22). Educated in England at Winchester College, he went on to read mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1922 becoming the first mathematical student to take a double first and 'B star' in two years.
Meredith was related to another mathematician, Thomas Meredith. He was a nephew of Richard Edmund Meredith and a cousin of Monk Gibbon, Judge James Creed Meredith and Ralph Creed Meredith. His old school friend from Winchester, William Empson, described him as "a small, gnomelike figure with a grin like a Cheshire cat and a pronounced Dublin accent (good for reading aloud from Joyce)".