In 1928, before leaving for Göttingen, Curry married Mary Virginia Wheatley. The couple lived in Germany while Curry completed his dissertation, then, in 1929, moved to State College, Pennsylvania where Curry accepted a position at Pennsylvania State College. They had two children, Anne Wright Curry (July 27, 1930) and Robert Wheatley Curry (July 6, 1934). Curry remained at Penn State for the next 37 years. He spent one year at University of Chicago in 1931–1932 under a National Research Fellowship and one year in 1938–1939 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1942 he took a leave of absence to do applied mathematics for the United States government during World War II, notably at the Frankford Arsenal. Immediately after the war he worked on the ENIAC project, in 1945 and 1946. Under a Fulbright fellowship, he collaborated with Robert Feys in Louvain, Belgium. After retiring from Penn State in 1966, Curry accepted a position at the University of Amsterdam. In 1970, after finishing the second volume of his treatise on the combinatory logic, Curry retired from the University of Amsterdam and returned to State College, Pennsylvania.
Haskell Curry died on September 1, 1982(1982-09-01) (aged 81), in State College, Pennsylvania.
Work
The focus of Curry's work were attempts to show that combinatory logic could provide a foundation for mathematics. Towards the end of 1933, he learned of the Kleene–Rosser paradox from correspondence with John Rosser. The paradox, developed by Rosser and Stephen Kleene, had proved the inconsistency of a number of related formal systems, including one proposed by Alonzo Church (a system which had the lambda calculus as a consistent subsystem) and Curry's own system.[2] However, unlike Church, Kleene, and Rosser, Curry did not give up on the foundational approach, saying that he did not want to "run away from paradoxes."[3]
By working in the area of Combinatory Logic for his entire career, Curry essentially became the founder and biggest name in the field. Combinatory logic is the foundation for one style of functional programming language. The power and scope of combinatory logic are quite similar to that of the lambda calculus of Church, and the latter formalism has tended to predominate in recent decades.
In 1947 Curry also described one of the first high-level programming languages and provided the first description of a procedure to convert a general arithmetic expression into a code for one-address computer.[4]
Curry also wrote and taught mathematical logic more generally; his teaching in this area culminated in his 1963 Foundations of Mathematical Logic. His preferred philosophy of mathematics was formalism (cf. his 1951 book), following his mentor Hilbert, but his writings betray substantial philosophical curiosity and a very open mind about intuitionistic logic.
Major publications
"Grundlagen der Kombinatorischen Logik" [Foundations of combinatorial logic]. American Journal of Mathematics (in German). 52 (3). The Johns Hopkins University Press: 509–536. 1930. doi:10.2307/2370619. JSTOR2370619.