Paul Joseph CohenArticle Free Pass Paul Joseph Cohen, (born
April 2, 1934, Long Branch, N.J., U.S.—died March 23, 2007,
Stanford, Calif.), American mathematician, who was awarded the
Fields Medal in 1966 for his proof of the independence of the
continuum hypothesis from the other axioms of set theory. Cohen
attended the University of Chicago (M.S., 1954; Ph.D., 1958). He
held appointments at the University of Rochester, N.Y.
(1957–58), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(1958–59) before joining the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton, N.J. (1959–61). In 1961 he moved to Stanford
University in California; he became professor emeritus in 2004.
Cohen was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress
of Mathematicians in Moscow in 1966. Cohen solved a problem
(first on David Hilbert’s influential 1900 list of important
unsolved problems) concerning the truth of the continuum
hypothesis. Georg Cantor’s continuum hypothesis states that
there is no cardinal number between ℵ0 and 2ℵ0. In 1940