- Lived:
- 1921–2012 · The Bronx, Chicago, New Haven
- Tradition:
- American analytic philosophy; the founder of quantified modal logic
- The Big Idea:
- Talk about necessity and possibility can be made mathematically exact — and once it is, names turn out to be mere tags on objects, true identities turn out to be necessary, and metaphysics gets its rigor back.
- In their words:
- A proper name has no hidden meaning — "it simply tags."
- If you remember one thing:
- A 24-year-old woman built the logic of possibility in 1946, anticipated a revolution in the theory of names, and spent decades watching the credit drift to others — until the record was corrected and the formula that bears her name entered every logic curriculum on earth.