IN MEMORIAM: GRIGORI E. MINTS 1939–2014
Solomon Feferman, Vladimir Lifschitz · Bulletin of Symbolic Logic · 2015
On May 29, 2014, ten days before his 75th birthday, Grigori ("Grisha") Mints died at Stanford, California of cardiac arrest; he had suffered a serious stroke a month before from which he never recovered.At the time of his death Mints held the position of Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University with courtesy appointments in Mathematics and Computer Science.His death unexpectedly cut short a distinguished and highly active career marked by a prodigious output of great breadth in logic and its applications.This included three books [1992, 1992a, 2000], another ten more of which he was an editor or translator, over 200 articles and over 3000 (!) reviews.His main contributions were to proof theory, constructive mathematics, intuitionistic logic, modal logic, and automated deduction.Mints was born on June 7, 1939 in Leningrad, USSR (currently St. Petersburg, Russia).He obtained the B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from Leningrad State University (currently St. Petersburg State University) in 1961, with a thesis on proof search in the classical predicate calculus.Working under the direction of Nikolai A. Shanin, Mints obtained the Ph.D. in Mathematics at the Leningrad S. U. in 1965, with a thesis on predicate and operator variants for theories of constructive mathematics (cf. the translation in [1965]).Finally, in 1990 he was awarded the D. Sc. in Mathematics at the Leningrad S. U. for a work on proof transformations and synthesis of programs.Mints was elected to the Estonian Academy of Sciences in 2008 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.From 1961 to 1979 Mints held the position of Research Associate at the Leningrad Branch of the Steklov Mathematics Institute.After submitting his request to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1979, he resigned his position at the Steklov Institute so as not to endanger the situation of his colleagues there by his possible association with them.In the difficult period that followed, among other things Mints supported himself by doing programming jobs and translating books and articles on logic from English into Russian.Meanwhile he was able to establish connections with the Institute of Cybernetics in Tallinn, Estonia, where he obtained a part time position as Research Associate from 1980 to 1984.This turned into a full time position as Senior Research Associate from 1985 to 1991.Mints was