Anil Nerode

Who is Anil Nerode?

Anil Nerode is an American mathematician. He received his undergraduate education and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, the latter under the directions of Saunders Mac Lane. He enrolled in the Hutchins College at the University of Chicago in 1947 at the age of 15, and received his Ph.D. in 1956. His Ph.D. thesis was on an algebraic abstract formulation of substitution in many-sorted free algebras and its relation to equational definitions of the partial recursive functions.

While in graduate school, beginning in 1954, he worked at Prof. Walter Bartky's Institute for Air Weapons Research, which did classified work for the US Air Force. He continued to work there following the completion of his Ph.D., from 1956 to 1957. In the summer of 1957 he attended the Cornell NSF Summer 1957 Institute in Logic. In 1958 to 1959 he went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked with Kurt Gödel.

Nerode is Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University. His interests are in mathematical logic, the theory of automata, computability and complexity theory, the calculus of variations, and distributed systems. With John Myhill, Nerode proved the Myhill–Nerode theorem specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for a formal language to be regular.