Jean-Yves Girard (born 1947) is a French logician working in proof theory. He is a research director (emeritus) at the mathematical institute of University of Aix-Marseille, at Luminy.

Biography

Jean-Yves Girard is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. He made a name for himself in the 1970s with his proof of strong normalization in a system of second-order logic called System F. This result gave a new proof of Takeuti's conjecture, which was proven a few years earlier by William W. Tait, Motō Takahashi and Dag Prawitz. For this purpose, he introduced the notion of "reducibility candidate" ("candidat de réducibilité"). He is also credited with the discovery of Girard's paradox, linear logic, the geometry of interaction, ludics, and (satirically) the mustard watch. He obtained the CNRS Silver Medal in 1983 and is a member of the French Academy of Sciences.