Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908 to 2000) was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition who held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978. He grew up in Akron, Ohio, took a mathematics degree at Oberlin College in 1930 and a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 1932 under Alfred North Whitehead. He taught logic and set theory, argued that first-order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of set theory called New Foundations. His link to computing runs through Boolean algebra: he wrote papers on the kind of Boolean algebra used in electrical engineering and, with Edward J. McCluskey, devised the Quine-McCluskey algorithm for reducing Boolean equations to a minimum covering sum of prime implicants. A computer program whose output is its own source code is called a quine after him, a usage Douglas Hofstadter introduced in 1979.