Carl Hewitt
Professor Carl Hewitt is the founder of the field of Inconsistency Robustness, i.e., the science and engineering of large systems with continual, pervasive inconsistencies (a shift from the previously dominant paradigms of inconsistency denial and inconsistency elimination). He is currently Board Chair of the International Society for Inconsistency Robustness. Previously, he was Program Chair of international symposia on the subject at Stanford in 2011 and 2014. The standard text on the subject is Inconsistency Robustness for which Hewitt is co-editor and a contributor. Operational aspects of Inconsistency Robustness are addressed using the Actor Model of computation and inferential aspects using Direct Logic™.
Hewitt is the creator (together with his students and other colleagues) of the Actor Model of computation, which influenced the development of the Scheme programming language and the π calculus, and inspired several other systems and programming languages. The Actor Model is in widespread industrial use including eBay, Microsoft, and Twitter. ActorScript™ and the Actor Model on which it is based can play an important role in the implementation of more inconsistency-robust information systems. Hewitt is Board Chair of Standard IoT™, an international standards organization for the Internet of Things, which is using the Actor Model to unify and generalize emerging standards for IoT.
Hewitt is also the creator (together with his students and other colleagues) of Direct Logic for inference in Inconsistency Robust systems. The goal of Classical Direct Logic is to provide mathematical foundations for Computer Science. Because Direct Logic is strongly typed, it defies Gödel's meta-mathematical results on which is the proposition of the Dedekind/Peano theory of numbers that is true but unprovable. Gödel proposed the sentence "I an not provable." as the true but unprovable sentence. However, Wittgenstein correctly pointed out that Gödel's sentence leads to inconsistency in mathematics. The resolution is that using strong types, it can be shown that Gödel's sentence is not a sentence of mathematics. Consequently Gödel's argument (using his sentence) is incorrect that mathematics cannot prove its own consistency without itself falling into inconsistency. In fact, mathematics proves its own consistency by a very simple proof without evident self-contradiction (e.g., all the usual paradoxes such as Russell, Berry, Girad, etc. do not produce inconsistencies).
Furthermore, Professor Hewitt has been an advocate in the fight against IoT mandatory backdoors. In fact, one of the purposes of the Standard IoT Foundation is to establish a solid basis for the preservation of civil liberties.
He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and Keio University and is Emeritus in the EECS department at MIT.
Part of Hewitt's doctoral dissertation was the design of Planner, the first programming language based on pattern-invoked procedural plans based on assertions and goals (Logic Programs), which influenced the development of Prolog (which iseffectively a subset) and subsequent more powerful programming languages (which incorporate Logic Program constructs) based on the Actor model.
