J. C. C. McKinsey

J.C.C. McKinsey
Born	30 April 1908 Clinton County, Indiana
Died	October 26, 1953(1953-10-26) (aged 45) Palo Alto, California
Other names	Chen McKinsey
Alma mater	New York University, University of California
Known for	Game theory
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematical logic Game theory
Institutions	RAND Corporation, Stanford University
Thesis	On Boolean functions of many variables
Doctoral advisor	Benjamin Abram Bernstein
Doctoral students	Jean Rubin

John Charles Chenoweth McKinsey (30 April 1908 – 26 October 1953), usually cited as J. C. C. McKinsey, was an American mathematician known for his work on game theory and mathematical logic, particularly, modal logic.

Biography

McKinsey received B.S. and M.S. degrees from New York University and a Ph.D. degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Blumenthal Research Fellow at New York University from 1936 to 1937 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1942 to 1943. He also taught at Montana State College, and in Nevada, then Oklahoma, and in 1947 he went "to a research group at Douglas Aircraft Corporation" that later became the RAND Corporation.

McKinsey worked at RAND until he was fired in 1951. The FBI considered him a security risk because he was a homosexual, in spite of the fact that he was an open homosexual who had been in a committed relationship for years. He complained to his superior "How can anyone threaten me with disclosure when everybody already knows?"

From 1951 he taught at Stanford University, where he was later appointed a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy, where he worked with Patrick Suppes on the axiomatic foundations of classical mechanics. He committed suicide at his home in Palo Alto in 1953.

Selected works

Book

• (originally publ. McGraw-Hill, 1952)

Papers

• McKinsey, J. C. C. (1941). "A solution of the decision problem for the Lewis systems S2 and S4, with an application to topology." The Journal of Symbolic Logic. 6 (4), 117–124. doi:10.2307/2267105

With Alfred Tarski

• McKinsey, J. C. C., Tarski, Alfred (1944). "The algebra of topology." Annals of mathematics, 141–191. https://doi.org/10.2307/1969080.
• McKinsey, J. C., Tarski, Alfred (1946). "On closed elements in closure algebras." Annals of mathematics, 122–162. https://doi.org/10.2307/1969038.