Walter Alexandre Carnielli (born 11 January 1952 in Campinas, Brazil) is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher, full professor of Logic at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). With Bachelor and M.Sc. degrees in mathematics at the State University of Campinas in Campinas he obtained his Ph.D. in 1984 from the same university under the supervision of Newton da Costa and subsequently worked as a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley as a Research Fellow, following an invitation by Leon Henkin.
Carnielli contributed to the proof theory and semantics of many-valued logics and paraconsistent logics. His tableau method for many-valued logics generalized all previous treatments of the subject.[1] His proposal of the possible-translations semantics (a new semantical interpretation for paraconsistent logics) contributed to a revival in the philosophical interpretation of paraconsistent logics.[2][3]
The logics of formal inconsistency, which systematize a large class of paraconsistent logics, opened the way to the application of paraconsistency to computer science and to new philosophical investigations on paraconsistency.
He also published on finite and infinite combinatorics, and developed (with his collaborators A. M. Sette and P. A. Veloso) the modulated logics, a new kind of logics that allows the formalization of qualitative reasoning by means of special generalized quantifiers. His research also includes model theory, non-classical logics, foundations of quantum computation, and combinations of logics.
Carnielli served as a Director for the Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science at UNICAMP for three terms, and served as President of the Brazilian Logic Society. He was distinguished with an Alexander von Humboldt grant for long-term research stays in Germany, and served as en editor and/or a member of editorial boards of major journals, such as Studia Logica, Logic and Logical Philosophy, Journal of Applied Logic, CLE e-Prints, Reports on Mathematical Logic and Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics. He is a recipient of the Telesio-Galilei Gold Medal Award 2012 in Philosophy and Mathematics.
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