Joseph Goguen

In the early 1990s Goguen and Rod Burstall developed the theory of institutions, a category-theoretic description of logical systems in computer science. Institution theory impacted the development of universal logic and became one of its most studied aspects. The term "Carnapian Goguenism" is used to refer to the application of institutions to ontologies.

From 1979 to 1988, Goguen worked at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. From 1988 to 1996, he was a professor at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford) in England and a Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1996 he became professor of Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Goguen's research in the 1970s was one of the earliest approaches to the characterisation of computational automata from a categorical perspective. Goguen's research with Thatcher, Wagner and Wright (also in the 1970s) was one of the earliest works to formalise the algebraic basis for data abstraction.

Goguen was a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. Specifically, since the early 1970s he was a student of Chögyam Trungpa and, after his death in 1987, of his son Sakyong Mipham. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was a faculty member of the science program at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

In a review of Goguen's work on fuzzy sets Radim Belohlavek wrote that In the early stages of the development of fuzzy systems, Goguen made profound contributions with lasting influence. Lotfi Zadeh viewed Goguen's 1968 approach to "The Logic of Inexact Concepts" as seminal in the field of fuzzy logic. Goguen's PhD dissertation "Categories of fuzzy sets" was the first work to apply category theory to fuzzy logic, and led to Goguen categories being named after him.

Goguen received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1963, and his PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968, where he was a student of the founder of fuzzy set theory, Lotfi Zadeh.

In the 1960s, along with Lotfi Zadeh, Goguen was one of the earliest researchers in fuzzy logic and made profound contributions to fuzzy set theory. In the 1970s Goguen's work was one of the earliest approaches to the algebraic characterisation of abstract data types and he originated and helped develop the OBJ family of programming languages. He was author of A Categorical Manifesto and founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. His development of institution theory impacted the field of universal logic. Standard implication in product fuzzy logic is often called "Goguen implication". Goguen categories are named after him.

Joseph Amadee Goguen (/ˈɡoʊɡən/ GOH-gən; June 28, 1941 – July 3, 2006) was an American computer scientist. He was professor of Computer Science at the University of California and University of Oxford, and held research positions at IBM and SRI International.