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Louis Goodstein
Times obituary
Professor Reuben Louis Goodstein, who died suddenly of a stroke on March 28 at the age of 72, was Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Leicester University.
The son of Alexander Goodstein, he was educated at St. Paul's School and (as Scholar and Research Scholar) at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he graduated with First Class Honours in 1933. As a lecturer at Reading University from 1935 to 1947, he taught a very wide range of courses, especially during the war years.
In 1948, he was appointed Professor and head of department at the University College of Leicester, where he presided over an expansion from a mathematics staff of six to 23 at the time of his retirement in 1977, with a corresponding increase in student numbers.
He served on many university bodies, including (as Dean of Science) the charter committee that oversaw the transition to university status in 1957. His interventions were few but trenchant and were respected the more because his concern was with general rather than sectional or departmental interests. He was Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1966 to 1969.
Goodstein's principal research interest was in the foundations of mathematics. Influenced by Wittgenstein and encouraged by Bernays, he deployed great technical ingenuity in a long series of monographs and research papers, in a detailed development of analysis from a strictly finitistic viewpoint, using a free variable equation calculus based on primitive recursion.
His attitude to the foundations was not widely shared in Britain, and his work received more attention abroad, especially from the Leningrad school: three books were published in Russian translation. There has recently been renewed interest in some of his early work, the first example of a purely number-theoretic first-order statement independent of Peano arithmetic, which he gave in 1944.
Beginning this activity when such studies were not widespread in this country, he taught many research students who later took positions in higher education.
His considerable output included several useful textbooks and expository works (with Dutch, Japanese, and Spanish translations), including two broad surveys of mathematical logic.
Particularly active in the Mathematical Association, he was instrumental in arranging for the transfer of its library and later the headquarters to Leicester and contributed nearly 70 notes as well as hundreds of reviews to the Mathematical Gazette, which he sustained at a high academic level during his editorship from 1956 to 1962.
A private and essentially shy person, Louis Goodstein will be remembered for great courtesy and generosity towards colleagues and students. He is survived by his wife Louba, a daughter, and a son.
Professor Reuben Louis Goodstein, who died suddenly of a stroke on March 28 at the age of 72, was Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Leicester University.
The son of Alexander Goodstein, he was educated at St. Paul's School and (as Scholar and Research Scholar) at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he graduated with First Class Honours in 1933. As a lecturer at Reading University from 1935 to 1947, he taught a very wide range of courses, especially during the war years.
In 1948, he was appointed Professor and head of department at the University College of Leicester, where he presided over an expansion from a mathematics staff of six to 23 at the time of his retirement in 1977, with a corresponding increase in student numbers.
He served on many university bodies, including (as Dean of Science) the charter committee that oversaw the transition to university status in 1957. His interventions were few but trenchant and were respected the more because his concern was with general rather than sectional or departmental interests. He was Pro-Vice-Chancellor from 1966 to 1969.
Goodstein's principal research interest was in the foundations of mathematics. Influenced by Wittgenstein and encouraged by Bernays, he deployed great technical ingenuity in a long series of monographs and research papers, in a detailed development of analysis from a strictly finitistic viewpoint, using a free variable equation calculus based on primitive recursion.
His attitude to the foundations was not widely shared in Britain, and his work received more attention abroad, especially from the Leningrad school: three books were published in Russian translation. There has recently been renewed interest in some of his early work, the first example of a purely number-theoretic first-order statement independent of Peano arithmetic, which he gave in 1944.
Beginning this activity when such studies were not widespread in this country, he taught many research students who later took positions in higher education.
His considerable output included several useful textbooks and expository works (with Dutch, Japanese, and Spanish translations), including two broad surveys of mathematical logic.
Particularly active in the Mathematical Association, he was instrumental in arranging for the transfer of its library and later the headquarters to Leicester and contributed nearly 70 notes as well as hundreds of reviews to the Mathematical Gazette, which he sustained at a high academic level during his editorship from 1956 to 1962.
A private and essentially shy person, Louis Goodstein will be remembered for great courtesy and generosity towards colleagues and students. He is survived by his wife Louba, a daughter, and a son.
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