Category: In memoriam
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Former NewAPPS blogger Helen de Cruz passed away yesterday, Friday, June 20, 2025. I never met Helen personally, but they were part of a vibrant community of bloggers at NewAPPS that welcomed me and provided the supportive context for my own development as a blogger ten years ago. That experience was, and is, very important…
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I was both saddened and stunned this morning to read of the passing of Charles Mills. I first met him at a SPEP years ago; I was having lunch at some random sandwich shop with friends. He knew one of us, and asked if he could join. Nevermind that we were all junior. I managed…
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John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and one of the early advocates for a libertarian cyberspace free of governmental regulation, as well as founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), died yesterday. The EFF notice is here. Barlow is perhaps best known for his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." As we look at a…
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The great historian of logic and mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness passed away about a month ago, aged 73. I only heard it yesterday, when Stephen Read posted a link to the Guardian obituary on Facebook. From the obituary: He rescued the moribund journal Annals of Science, founded the journal History and Philosophy of Logic, and was on the board of Historia Mathematica from…
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By Catarina Dutilh Novaes As readers will have noticed, since yesterday there has been an outpour of expressions of sorrow for the passing of Patrick Suppes everywhere on the internet. He was without a doubt one of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century, and so all the love and appreciation is…
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By Catarina Dutilh Novaes Alexander Grothendieck, who is viewed by many as the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, has passed away yesterday after years of living in total reclusion. (To be honest, I did not even know he was still alive!) He was a key figure in the development of the modern theory of…
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Another sad loss this week: psychologist Sandra Bem, a pioneer in the empirical study of gender roles, passed away on Tuesday, May 20th. Here is the most complete obituary I could find so far, which details nicely her scientific contributions and the practical impact they had in gender policies. For example, it was largely based…
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This morning, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock posted on Philos-L the sad news of Laurence Goldstein’s passing, after a short illness. I suspect that this comes very much as a surprise to most of us in the philosophy community, as Laurence seemed to be active and thriving; among other things, his edited collection Brevity came out just last…
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Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago, has died. Becker is perhaps best known for "human capital" theory, which talks about how one might, for example, come to think of education as an investment in one's future earnings. As the absolute normalcy of a statement like this would suggest, I think…
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