William M Farmer

William M. Farmer has over 35 years of experience working in industry and academia in computing and mathematics. He received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1978 and an M.A. in mathematics in 1980, an M.S. in computer sciences in 1983, and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1984 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University. Before joining McMaster in 1999, he conducted research in...See more

William M. Farmer has over 35 years of experience working in industry and academia in computing and mathematics. He received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1978 and an M.A. in mathematics in 1980, an M.S. in computer sciences in 1983, and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1984 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University. Before joining McMaster in 1999, he conducted research in computer science for twelve years at The MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts, USA and taught computer programming and networking courses for two years at St. Cloud State University. Dr. Farmer's research interests are logic, mechanized mathematics, mathematical knowledge management, and formal methods. One of his most significant achievements is the design and implementation of the IMPS proof assistant, which was done at MITRE in partnership with Dr. Joshua Guttman and Dr. Javier Thayer. His work on IMPS has lead to research on developing practice-oriented logics and set theories and on organizing mathematical knowledge as a network of interconnected axiomatic theories. He and Dr. Jacques Carette are currently leading the MathScheme project at McMaster with the aim of developing a framework for integrating axiomatic and algorithmic mathematics. On this project Dr. Farmer has focused on how to reason about the interplay of syntax and semantics, as exhibited in syntax-based mathematical algorithms like symbolic differentiation, within a logic equipped with global quotation and evaluation operators. Dr. Farmer has had a career-long interest in using simple type theory as a practical logic for expressing and reasoning about mathematical ideas. He is the author of "The Seven Virtues of Simple Type Theory", Journal of Applied Logic, 6:267-286, 2008, one of the leading references on simple type theory. See less