Francisco Antônio Dória

Who is Francisco Antônio Dória?

Francisco Antônio de Moraes Accioli Dória is a Brazilian mathematician, philosopher, and genealogist. Francisco Antônio Dória received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1968 and then got his doctorate from the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics, advised by Leopoldo Nachbin in 1977. Dória worked for a while at the Physics Institute of UFRJ, and then left to become a Professor of the Foundations of Communications at the School of Communications, also at UFRJ. Dória held visiting positions at the University of Rochester, Stanford University, and the University of São Paulo. His most prolific period spawned from his collaboration with Newton da Costa, a Brazilian logician and one of the founders of paraconsistent logic, which began in 1985. He is currently Professor of Communications, Emeritus, at UFRJ and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy.

His main achievement is the proof that chaos theory is undecidable, and when properly axiomatized within classical set theory, is incomplete in the sense of Gödel. The decision problem for chaotic dynamical systems had been formulated by mathematician Morris Hirsch.