Rate My Professor Walter Dean

Walter Dean is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he serves as the undergraduate course convenor for the Mathematics and Philosophy joint degrees. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University in 2007, a PhD in Computer Science from the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2010, and an MSc in Logic from the University of Amsterdam in 1999. Dean joined the University of Warwick in 2009 and has been on research leave for significant periods, including as a von Humboldt Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) for terms 2 and 3 of 2020-2021 and all of 2021-2022, and as a Fellow of the French Institute for Advanced Study hosted by the Institut d'études avancées de Paris for 2022-2023. His research focuses on philosophy of mathematics, mathematical and philosophical logic, theoretical computer science, and the history and philosophy of computation.

Dean's publications include 'On the methodology of informal rigour: Set theory, semantics, and intuitionism' (with Hidenori Kurokawa, forthcoming 2021), 'On consistency and existence in mathematics' in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2020), 'Recursive functions' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020), 'Incompleteness via paradox and completeness' in Review of Symbolic Logic (2019), 'Computational complexity theory and the philosophy of mathematics' in Philosophia Mathematica (2019), 'Strict finitism, feasibility and the sorites' in Review of Symbolic Logic (2018), 'The Prehistory of the Subsystems of Second-Order Arithmetic' (with Sean Walsh) in Review of Symbolic Logic (2017), 'Bernays and the completeness theorem' in Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science (2017), 'Algorithms and the mathematical foundations of computer science' in The Limits of Mathematical Knowledge (2016), 'Squeezing feasibility' in Pursuit of the Universal: 12th Conference on Computability in Europe (2016), 'Arithmetical reflection and the provability of soundness' in Philosophia Mathematica (2015), and 'Kreisel’s Theory of Constructions, the Kreisel-Goodman paradox, and the second clause' (with Hidenori Kurokawa) in Advances in proof theoretic semantics (2015). He has presented lectures including 'Mathematical difficulty, SAT solvers, and bounded arithmetic' (with Alberto Naibo) at Artificial Intelligence and Theorem Proving (2022), 'On the indispensability of mathematics to philosophy' at Reverse Mathematics and its Philosophy (2022), and 'On consistency and existence in mathematics' at the Aristotelian Society (2020).