Juliette Kennedy

Juliette Kennedy is a logician and philosopher of mathematics working in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki. Her work in mathematical logic is in the areas of arithmetic, extended constructibility and set-theoretic model theory; her philosophical work is in the area of Gödel studies and more recently in the areas of logicality and metaphor. Her most recent book is called The Incompleteness Theorems (Cambridge 2022), a mathematical, historical and philosophical treatment of those theorems.

Her Guggenheim Fellowship will be devoted to writing a monograph on the question, how is it that mathematics can reach all the way through language and hook onto the world? This work will extend and deepen the ideas of her 2020 monograph called Gödel, Tarski and the Lure of Natural Language: Logical Entanglement, Formalism Freeness (Cambridge 2020), which was about the embeddedness of mathematics in language, and the distinction between syntax (sign) and semantics (meaning).

Kennedy also works avocationally in the art field as a curator, having organised a number of exhibitions of the American artist Fred Sandback, along with other exhibitions devoted to the artists Maria Clara Cortés, Andy Goldsworthy and Kathrin Hilton.