|
|
|
|
We are saddened by the passing of Professor Robert K. Meyer, affectionately known by all as Bob, after a long battle with cancer. He will be sorely missed. Bob passed away in May 2009.
Memorial Service: A memorial will be held on July 7th 2009 for Bob Meyer, in The Hall at University House from 1400-1500. Family and guests are invited to afternoon tea from 1500-1630 in the Great Hall following the proceedings.
Donations: The family requests that any donations be given to either World Vision or the Paul Thistlewaite Scholarship at the ANU via the Endowments Office of the ANU.
Bob Meyer Logic Scholarships: In memory of Bob, the Annual Logic Summer School will award scholarships in his name.
Bob was the Maximum Leader of the Logicians Liberation League; for the manifesto of the LLL see http://users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~rkm/manifesto.html
If you knew Bob, you can leave a message or photo here. These will be compiled and shared on this site.
Slideshow from the Bob Meyer Memorial Service.
Bob's research pages can be accessed here.
Essay (Tribute to GAIA)I WANTED to find a way to tell you how much I love you,And would love you, had we but world enough and time ... When I realized that we always do ... We live suspended elastically among polarities, Polarities constantly tugging us in opposite directions Toward a fulfilment impossible to achieve ... We know in our hearts and deepest instincts That we are each of us an eternal spark of star-fire; That we are each of us the centre of a universe. Yet we know just as surely that we are each As ephemeral as the morning dew And as insignificant to the totality as a grain of sand ... Caught between such contradictions, what can we believe, What can we feel, how can we think at all? Every living being is a microcosm of the universe, Is a macrocosm of the molecule, is a tiny link In a net of life stretching back to the very morning Of creation when the ionized amino syrup jelled, Became aware of itself, and began to evolve. So we seek to know how our evolution is proceeding. Who among us has the right to guide evolution from now on? We, who are the beneficiaries of evolutionary progress So far? And what is progress from here on? Are we to be sculptures that sculpt one another? We cannot tell which changes are the changes that should Happen, and we cannot force the universe into our image. But we can apprehend a little of the infinite variety of things The short while we are here; We can appreciate the gift of living, The flight of consciousness. We can learn to flow with the river of existence And expand into more and more of its currents. So we travel; fish swimming from a dimly understood Hatching toward an unknown whirlpool ... And we must travel alone, Each of us locked within skin definitions of self, Ego images never completely synched with reality, Excluded forever from the oneness that we are a part of, Instantiated in illusions of separateness. |
But we are neither completely alone; We create ourselves, and are created by, our communities. When we look around us again we discover That we are a part of, not a chain, But a multi-dimensional mesh, A veritably infinite series of webs spun around us, Holding us together, binding our fates To the rocks, to the oceans, to the galaxies. The web is love. The very contradictions are held together with it. Love is what we all have in common, What we must constantly struggle to practise, To express, and to reveal. Love is the secret That we can never allow ourselves to show perfectly, to share unreservedly. But love is the secret that we cannot hide completely. Love is the pervasive birth and dying, The ebb and flow in our neurons, The cement of our edifices, The syntax of our poetry. And you, you without whom the future cannot blossom, You who were born to celebrate eternity, Won't you help me to dance a welcome to the sunrise And sing an anthem to our breathing? We are, and it is enough that we are, For we are the present and the future Of all that has ever been. Together we can make love to what is, For we are what is. Paradox : You will never know exactly how beautiful And alive you really are ... - Barbara Meyer |
I first met Bob shortly after he moved to the ANU in 1976, many visits by Bob to Wollongong and by me to the ANU followed. Our first joint paper appeared in 1978. At times, usually around 11pm, Bob tried to communicate new ideas of his over the phone. Unfortunately I didn’t have his capacity of working on new material without seeing it written down.
I would like to mention the outcome of one visit of Bob's to Wollongong that illustrates his abilities. My English colleague Roger Hindley, who was visiting there, raised an interesting problem. Bob rang the next day to say that he had solved the problem, in his car, on his way home to Canberra. We heard nothing more about this and assumed he had been wrong. Some time later I mentioned the problem at a conference here. Bob said "But I have a solution to that, give me five minutes at the end of your talk to explain it." This he proceeded to do (all off the cuff of course), but after half an hour the conference organizers decided the next speaker should get his chance and that Bob could finish his solution after the last conference talk. This took another 45 minutes. I wrote all this down and took it back to Wollongong and there shortened Bob's solution to about four pages. Bob was happy with my version, but in his inimitable fashion extended it to a major paper of 78 pages! The result, the D-completeness of T->, is still one of my most cited papers. The problem has since been solved independently by Mints and Tammit. Tammit said to Bob "We both used a machine. Mine was a computer, yours a car."
We will miss Bob's impromptu performances at the HQ of the Academy of the Humanities, cunningly disguised as social visits. He would drop by the Secretariat offices, under the pretext of returning voting papers or asking a procedural question, and offer us his unique companionship for a few minutes or an hour. His friends at the Academy - Fellows and staff alike - will miss his bonhomie, his roving intelligence, his candour and his deeply felt human goodwill. What a fabulous man! We are all glad of the chance we were afforded to know Bob, and we will carry him forward with us for all our days.
I am no songwriter. So what could have inspired me to think up the words to a rap song? I pictured it as the theme song to a tv show whose host was an extremely cool rock star called Captain Bob. After quite some time I understood that it was Bob Meyer who was my inspiration. The first time I saw him, in the Coombs tea room, he was wearing a hat like a naval captain might wear. It was a dashing image. There still isn't any music, but it's definitely a song and not just a poem. I like to picture Captain Bob's band performing it, maybe with Bobi on keyboard and Zorba on drums, for the Logicians Liberation League, and I like to hope it would make Bob smile.
Cap’n Bob theme song
c’mon kiddies gather round
check out what is going down
forget your nap
cut the crap
Cap’n Bob has hit the town
he walk the walk
he talk the talk
he watch it all like some old hawk
there’s nothin he don’t understand
he put his mama in the band
he bang the drum
he go banana
he make that mama play piana
they tear their shirt
they go berserk
the Cap’n smiles and eats dessert
he don’t talk loud
he don’t feel proud
ain’t no one cooler walkin round
the Cap’n strolls
he dog the trolls
lays back and lets the evening roll
he just the Cap’n they call Bob
he take his pay, he do his job
he sets you rockin with his band
he Cap’n Bob kids. he the man.
I miss you, Bob.
Attachment: DProf.MeyerinChina.jpg
So many memories of Bob, we hardly know what to record here, but finally...
...how could we forget of the Best Man's speech at our wedding, during which he revealed all - all the axioms of R, that is, printed on his tee shirt.
Attachment: bob_2.jpg
My deepest sympathy to Bobbi, Jay, Dorothy, Vandy, Billy and Maria.
I'll never forget the time Bob and his 5 children came to our house in Melbourne for a holiday. It was a very happy and memorable occasion for all concerned.
As a logician, he provided much inspiration, always being deeply involved in some technical logical problem. One of his last performances would have been at the Auckland AAL last April, when to tried to solve the decision problem for the entailment fragment of the relevant logic T. He spoke on this topic for 3 hours without any notes.
He was highly original; his work will make an indelible mark on the history of logic. He proselytized relevant logic wherever he went. The 4 works that stand out the most for me are: the Routley-Meyer semantics for relevant logics, metacompleteness, the non-triviality of relevant arithmetic by finitary methods, and extensional reduction. The semantics has many applications and a wealth of important technical results. `Metacompleteness' is a highly original concept that applies to those logics that solve the set-theoretic and semantic paradoxes. (I refer to it in every paper I write.) His contribution to the Hilbert-program for relevant arithmetic was inspirational. His and Richard Routley's Extensional Reduction Parts I & II should be prescribed reading for all logicians. The latter paper was written by Bob, originally over 120 pages, and represents Bob at his very best. I was very pleased to be able to publish Part II in RLR2, although slightly condensed.
I will miss you Bob very much.
Thank you for your contribution to Australian logic. We will all miss you.
In Memoriam: Robert K. Meyer. Robert Kenneth (Bob) Meyer, a major contributor in the field of
non-classical logics, and a central figure on the Australasian logical scene, died in Canberra on May 6 2009
at the age of 76, after a long struggle with cancer. Before his retirement as Professor in 1998, Meyer spent
more than twenty years at the Australian National University, first in Philosophy at the Research School of
Social Sciences, and latterly in the Automated Reasoning Project, of which he was a founder.
Meyer was born on 27 May 1932 in Philadelphia. He received a Bachelor of Divinity at Princeton
Theological Seminary in 1956. After studying Japanese in Kyoto, he served as a missionary at the Christian
Institute of Industrial Relations in Osaka from 1959 to 1962. Impelled by questions about the foundations
of his religious beliefs, he enrolled as a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh,
receiving a PhD in 1966 under the supervision of Nuel Belnap. From 1965 to 1974, he taught in Philosophy
departments at West Virginia University, Rice University, Bryn Mawr College, Indiana University, and the
Universities of Toronto and Pittsburgh. From 1974 until his retirement in 1998, he was at the Australian
National University. Meyer served as the President of the Australasian Association for Logic in 1982 and
was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in the same year.
Meyer was famous for his work in relevant logic and entailment. An early ma jor contribution in the area
was his proof (with J.M. Dunn) of the admissibility of the rule γ in the logics R and E. His best known work
in the area is his series of papers with Richard Routley, expounding the relational semantics for relevant
logics, and proving completeness theorems and many other results with its aid.
Bob Meyer's brilliance as a logician and his infectious enthusiasm stimulated the growth of the Australian school of logic.
In the 1980s, the research group surrounding him pioneered the use of computers in
investigating logical problems. This group formed the nucleus of the Automated Reasoning Project, that
later morphed into the Logic and Computation Group (both at ANU).
Bob was noted not only for his enormous and unquenchable enthusiasm for logic, but also for his wit
and humour. From 1969 onwards, he was the Maximum Leader of the Logicians Liberation League; for
the manifesto of the LLL see http://users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~rkm/manifesto.html. Remarkable also is his
contribution to rational theology, "God Exists!" (published in Nous 21: 345-61, 1987), in which he proves
that God’s existence (under a certain interpretation) is equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. Bob is remembered
fondly by his family and his many friends and colleagues as a remarkable logician, and a wonderful human
being.
An unanticipated delight of spending six weeks of study leave in Pittsburgh in 1974 was meeting and seeing a fair bit of Bob. As everyone remembers, he was a delightful, generous, brilliant, eccentric, enthusiastic man with a marvellous sense of humour, not an ounce of malice, and a gift of friendship. I saw him seldom but always with joy; we and the world are poorer for his passing, but above all richer for having known him.
Bob was a truly awesome teacher, friend, and maximum leader. His insights and humour are irreplaceable and it is with much sorrow that I write these words. He will be missed by all.
Bob took my graduate seminar on non-classical logics in the autumn of 1964 at the University of Pittsburgh, along with Mike Dunn, Jay Rosenberg and others. Unlike the other students, he had been a missionary in Japan, and was about the same age as me. For their essays, class members chose a topic from the list of problems that we had been studying, and Bob chose the task of axiomatizing the pure implicational fragment of Lukasiewicz's three-valued logic. Bob had not previously studied any logic, but to my surprise, and the surprise of everyone else in the class, he succeeded in constructing an axiomatization. Genius will out, and Bob was a genuine logical genius. We published the result together in 1966 in the Journal of Symbolic Logic, but Bob is the one to whom credit is due.
Since that time, Bob and I have remained good friends. Unlike Nuel, I did not have to contend with his late-night working habits. We visited him several times in Canberra where he was the heart and soul of the Automated Reasoning Project at ANU, and he came to Montreal to visit us at least once. Amazingly, the operation that removed half his brain a few years ago did not in the slightest affect his powers of reasoning, or his easy-going and delightful temperament. He has been a friendly critic for many years of the idea of connexive implication, a type of implication that shares certain properties with relevance logics, and I shall always remember with admiration, and a tiny element of irritation, his article "S5: The Poor Man's Connexive Implication". When I told him recently I was trying to prove the consistency of arithmetic, Bob said that he was working on proving its inconsistency. Both Ann and I will miss him a lot.
From the beginning it was clear that Bob was going to have a brilliant career in mathematical logic. He was quick, creative, and exceptionally witty in a very gentle way. He helped produce a very pleasant atmosphere in all our meetings. His output has proved that my initial hopes have been fully realized. I met him last in July, 2008 in Melbourne at the Logic Congress being held there at the time. He was as always quite a presence, a good and generous man, a real friend. I shall miss him greatly.
Seven years ago when I first met Bob, I strongly believed that he would live over 100 years and he would be destined to be one of my best friends. But, one month ago when I heard that he passed away, I could not help weeping and felt that I lost a most helpful mentor in my life. Not only did he teach me how to do research especially in logic, but also he advised me how to lead a personal life. Among those suggestions and advices from him, there are two sentences that impress me most:
(1)Always pick up the first choice, NEVER the second one.
(2)If there is any fault, it is not yours but others’.
It was in the summer of 2002 that I first met Bob in Bloomington where I just started my PhD study in the Mathematics Department of Indiana University. At that time I was studying for my Tier 1 exam and preparing for my soon-coming one-year study in University of Amsterdam. He learned from my PhD advisor Prof. Mike Dunn that I was good at mathematical logic. So he decided to pass on to me his most important research project, which he called “the Key to the Universe”(K2U for short). Actually it is a problem about the possible correspondence between the combinators in lambda calculus and axioms in relevance logic. I was instantly attracted by the NAME of the problem. But soon I realized that it was in fact very elusive and difficult. After I went to Holland that August, I almost totally forgot the problem.
In the spring of 2004, he SUDDENLY appeared in front of me again and kept touch with me since then. It was a Presidential election year: Bush (Republican) vs. Kerry (Democratic). He was quite disappointed with the Bush administration’s domestic policies (It is proved that Bob was impressively foresighted on politics). So he determined to be a volunteer for Kerry in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. He told me that he wanted to visit some friends in China. I helped him with this trip and he had a happy time in Beijing. When we met again in Bloomington, he immediately got to the “point” and started to blackboard the logical deductions about K2U again and AGAIN. I was totally moved by his devotion to the research problem even at such an old age as 72. In the evenings, we often went to the Mothers’ bears to eat pizza but he did not stop working on the problem and “scrabbled” logical formulas on our napkins. After dinners, he insisted to pay because he strongly believed that I could help him to find the “key”. Around 2 weeks later, he went to Ohio and Pennsylvania. On his trip to Ohio, he also wanted to help as a volunteer a young lady of age 26 who graduated from Stanford University a couple of years earlier and now decided to run for the Senate. He had no doubt that this ambitious lady would one day become the first WOMAN President of the United States of America. Unfortunately, Kerry lost the campaign in Ohio although the young lady won there. Probably because he had other commitments or the campaigns took a little longer than he had expected, he missed the flight back to Australia. He wanted to change the schedule and bought the ticket from the China East Airlines. But the customer services of the company made him very angry and the fee was terribly high. He swore that he would not buy tickets from this airlines company any more.
He went to Indiana almost every summer. One of his sons lives in a small town which is close to Bloomington. And most importantly, one of his former PhD students Michael McRobbie had been vice President of Indiana University for a long time and was elected to the President in 2007. He was most proud of that. Just before my PhD defense, he visited me and was quite interested in the fact that I would be the last PhD of Prof. Mike Dunn. After graduation, I came to Tsinghua University, Beijing to do my postdoctoral research in the Computer Science Department here. He wrote to me that he wanted to coauthor a paper with me on K2U, which would be probably the last research article in his academic life. In the summer of 2008, he gave a talk about the paper in a conference which held in Melbourne. He put my name together with him in the talk but it was actually totally his work. Around last May, he told me that he was checked that he got lung cancer and had to cancel his planned trip to Korea, Japan and China. He was VERY unhappy because he quitted smoking one year earlier and it seemed that non-smoking instead of smoking caused the lung cancer. He treated the cancer very calmly and was very optimistic about his health situation. He kept writing encouragement letters to his European friends with cancer how to fight against it. Despite all these, he knew clearly how serious the cancer would be to his career as a logician. He wanted to finish the paper with me as quickly as possible. With the money from the director of CSL of ANU that he had planned for his travel to international conferences, he invited me to go to Canberra for a three-week collaboration.
Finally I had opportunity to visit Australia. In fact, one year earlier I applied for a postdoctoral position at ANU but my application was rejected. The Australian trip was one of the happiest experiences in my life. The ANU campus is quite beautiful and Canberra is one of the most beautiful cities that I have ever seen. I made a lot of friends in the Computer Sciences Lab (CSL). Each afternoon, Bob would come to my office and worked together with me on “the key to the universe”. I felt guilty that I was not in a good shape at that time and could not concentrate on research well. Bob lost his temper and said: “Chunlai, your advisor recommended that you are one of his best PhDs. But your performance here does not show that”. I was very lucky to visit the house of his partner Bobi in Canberra and his own house in a small town called Gunning, which is around 45 minutes’ drive from ANU. In his house, we watched together Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in the Democratic Presidential Nomination Convention in Denver. He really appreciated one “slogan” in his speech: “This campaign is not about me; it is about you”. When he learned that the Republican nominee John Mccain exceeded Obama in the Indiana poll, he got very anxious and planned to go to Indiana to help Obama. On the way back to Canberra, we talked a lot and he told me many stories about his life in Japan and in Australia. His ready wit and humor impressed me most. Bob likes politics a lot. In Australia he was a member of the labor party and in US he was a democratic. It seems that he rarely missed any gatherings of the labor party in ACT and certainly never missed any presidential campaign in US. Also he taught me basics about the political systems of both Australia and US.
I came back to Beijing after this three week stay in Canberra. He was a little disappointed with my performance on K2U but did not give up any effort to find the key. He decided to consult Prof. Dana Scott, one of the best logicians in the world and visited a young Indian student in Berkeley. But they could not help him either. One month later, I went to Germany. Bob still sent emails to me asking me keeping working on K2U during my stay in Europe. But, for a long time in the beginning of this year, I had not received any words from him. On the past Easter, he wrote an email to me and told me that the College of Computer Science and Engineering of ANU and the Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University now proposed some exchange and cooperation programs, and his collaboration with me on K2U was already one part of this joint program. I had never realized that this would be the last email from him. Afterwards, he went to hospital and still talked about the key to the universe a couple of days before his death. I felt most guilty that I have not contributed any significant result to his life-long project. I had planned to send a small gift for his May-27th birthday. But the gift that Bob really wanted is “the key to the universe”.
I lost a most insightful and helpful mentor in my life. The only thing that I am able to do is to try my best to find the “key”, which Bob desired most and had not enough time to find.
I had the unforgettable privilege of being Bob Meyer's PhD student between
1975 and 1979, then his colleague until I left ANU at the end of 1996. I
greatly regret I could not be there today to honor him one last time.
In academic life one regularly meets numerous highly intelligent people, but
one meets few geniuses. Bob was one of those few. His brilliance and
extraordinary creativity, especially during the seventies and early
eighties, was of an level of sustained excellence one is lucky to see once
in a lifetime. I believe all his students and colleagues who worked with him
or who were familiar with his work, all felt that they were in the presence
of a genuinely unique intellectual force. His personal generosity and
kindness were remarkable; his eccentricities legendary.
To his family, who he adored & of whom he was always proud, I am sure your
grief is profound and I send my deepest condolences.
To all his friends, colleagues and former colleagues who are present today
at his funeral at this sad time, I am sure we are all united in the belief
that without cliché it can be said of Bob, that we will never see his like
again.
Michael McRobbie
President of Indiana University
Student of Bob Meyer
Bob and I were friends from our first meeting in 1963. He took a
graduate course or two of mine, and subsequently I was technically the
adviser for his 1966 dissertation although, of course, he needed no
external input. I take pride only in convincing him to switch his area
of concentration to Philosophical Logic.
I had the privilege of spending time with Bob frequently over the
forty-five years since our first meeting. He was a wonderful
companion, marvelously witty, as smart as anyone in my experience,
always original, and much more eccentric in his habits than anyone I
have known. His contributions to the foundations of relevant logics
(here I defer to Bob's preferred terminology) are quite properly
legendary. One of his most important talents was his ability to
meditate on some rather waffly question or conjecture, and come up
with some diamond-sharp theorem or theory. I was repeatedly amazed by
his fecundity in this respect.
The longest time that I shared with Bob since his graduate-school days
was a period in the mid-seventies during my one-term stay in
Canberra. My memory of that time is vivid. We were both working on
material to be included in volume II of Entailment. My part was
devoted to editing old stuff, whereas Bob was creating brand new
material. Our plan involved frequent consultation. The diffculty was,
of course, that Bob was essentially nocturnal, whereas I sleep at
night. Here is how it worked. In the morning, I would come into the
University, work through the day, and then have some supper. Bob would
appear about 8:00 p.m., and we would consult with each other between
8:00 and 11:00 p.m. At that point, I would go to bed, whereas Bob
would work through the night. In the morning, he would first prepare
breakfast for the five of his ten children that were then living with
him, and then he would sleep through the day, getting up in time to
prepare dinner for the children. And so on. His form of eccentricity
was entirely compatible with a large sense of responsibility for
providing his children with all the parental love that could be
wished.
At the time, Bob was working on a major paper, the length of which
extended into three digits. The first day, when I came into the offce
in the morning, there were waiting for me three or four pages of
perfect typescript that he had generated during the night. The magic
was this. The same thing happened day after day. Each morning, there
would be another three or four pages of faultless typescript. At first
it appeared to me as if the paper were unrolling like a window
blind. But no: I eventually saw that, for example, definitions entered
on page two would not be used for a long, long time, but would only be
seen to be essential on, say, page thirty-five. The conclusion was
that Bob had the entire paper in his mind. It was only the typescript
that came into existence bit by bit. He already knew, when writing
page two what would be required on page thirty-five. From the
beginning, Bob had before his mind the entire one-hundred-plus-page
canvas. I have never seen the like.
There are scores of Bob-Meyer stories that could be told. Let it
suffice for me to say now that I say "goodbye" to Bob with great
affection, with enormous regret at his passing, and with bottomless
gratitude for all that he has done for philosophical logic, for many
folks worth caring about, and for me personally. It has been the
privilege of all that knew Bob to have crossed paths with a beautiful
man.
Nuel Belnap
My wife Sally and I knew Bob (and Bobbi) since Sally and I were graduate students in Pittsburgh in the mid 1960's. Bob and I were both graduate students in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and studied with Nuel Belnap and also with Alan Anderson, the founders of "relevant logic," a subject both Bob and I pursued throughout our careers. Bob and I were colleagues at Indiana University in the early 1970's, and I visited Bob several times (once for a year) after he moved to the ANU. We co-authored 10 papers together, and saw each other probably at least once a year -- Bob would come visit his son Bob who lives near us.
It is impossible to exaggerate the influence Bob had on me and my work. He will be missed. Sally and I extend our condolences and best wishes to Bobbi and the rest of their family, and to all of Bob's friends!
Mike Dunn
Dear Meyer family.
To Bobbi, Bill, Dorothy, Wendy, and to the others we have never met
but of whom we heard quite often, we present our deepest condolences.
Far away from here, we share your pain and your tears. With Bob we
lose a very special friend, a faithful summer visitor always bringing
his good humor and his many lights in our dark northern skies.
On his repeated pilgrimages around the world, chasing some lemma or in
search of the elusive Key to the Universe, arpenting the old continent
he had settled his Headquarters in safe Flat and Low Country where he
counted many allies from Ghent to Liege through Brussels and Louvain.
Dear Bob, thank you for all the wonderful memories you created for
us. You were around during our best years. When life started to
collect her share and I was fighting alone, you sent support and
prayers. When you decided to join the fight, you always minimized your
own condition to inquire and care for mine. I was full of admiration
watching your heroic combat for Democracy while you had to fight for
your own life.
Thank you for all and farewell, we will miss you and never forget.
Jacques and Catherine Riche.
Bob Meyer was my mentor and my friend. I first started working with him in 1989 when I had just finished my doctorate and was still wet behind the ears. Bob took me under his wing and we subsequently wrote several papers together. His brilliant work has influenced me professionally and his kindness affected me personally in a very deep way. And we had great times together. I have extremely fond memories of sitting in his house in the wee hours arguing about some line that we were trying to write or putting some silly joke in a footnote, of driving to some random town in New South Wales to eat in a diner and try to prove some theorem, and of getting phone calls or emails from Bob from the four corners of the world to discuss a logic problem with me that I had never before considered. I will miss Bob very much.
Will miss him dearly.
