Per Martin-Löf

Who is Per Martin-Löf?

Per Erik Rutger Martin-Löf is a Swedish logician, philosopher, and mathematical statistician. He is internationally renowned for his work on the foundations of probability, statistics, mathematical logic, and computer science. Since the late 1970s, Martin-Löf's publications have been mainly in logic. In philosophical logic, Martin-Löf has wrestled with the philosophy of logical consequence and judgment, partly inspired by the work of Brentano, Frege, and Husserl. In mathematical logic, Martin-Löf has been active in developing intuitionistic type theory as a constructive foundation of mathematics; Martin-Löf's work on type theory has influenced computer science.

Until his retirement in 2009, Per Martin-Löf held a joint chair for Mathematics and Philosophy at Stockholm University.

His brother Anders Martin-Löf is now emeritus professor of mathematical statistics at Stockholm University; the two brothers have collaborated in research in probability and statistics. The research of Anders and Per Martin-Löf has influenced statistical theory, especially concerning exponential families, the expectation-maximization method for missing data, and model selection.

Per Martin-Löf is an enthusiastic bird-watcher, whose first scientific publication was on the mortality rates of ringed birds.