From: *Peter Schroeder-Heister* <psh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, October 22, 2017
Subject: [FOM] Sad news: Kosta Dosen
To: fom <fom@xxxxxxxxxx>
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unpublished manuscripts in his Nachlass.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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://ls.inf.uni-tuebingen.de
--
palma, apgs
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