Rohit Jivanlal Parikh


Rohit Jivanlal Parikh is an American mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory. He is a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York.

Research

Parikh's catholic attitude towards logic has led to work on topics like vagueness, ultrafinitism, belief revision, logic of knowledge, game theory and social software. This last area seeks to combine techniques from logic, computer science and game theory to understand the structure of social algorithms. Examples of such are elections, transport systems, lectures, conferences, and monetary systems, all of which have properties of interest to those who are logically inclined.
Parikh's theorem, stating that regular languages and context-free languages have the same sets of letter frequency vectors, is named after him. Among his other contributions is the introduction of bounded arithmetic and the logic of games.

Personal life and politics

Rohit Parikh was married from 1968 to 1994 to Carol Parikh, who is best known for her prize-winning stories and for her influential biography of Oscar Zariski, The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski. They have two children, Vikram and Uma.
In 2018, a Facebook post by Parikh calling for deportation of all illegal immigrants, writing, “I do believe that everyone who is illegally here should be deported but that the US should support them in their home country.” Parikh further claims in the Facebook post that Hispanic immigrants are insufficiently educated compared to Indian immigrants like him, leading Brooklyn College students to public protests and calls for the university to discipline him. The president of Brooklyn College Michelle Anderson called his remarks "antithetical to the fundamental values of Brooklyn College." Defending his position in an interview to a CW-affiliate WPIX, Parikh claimed he had not meant that Hispanics in general were dumber than Indians in general, but rather that his comparison of intellectual abilities of Hispanics and Indians had applied only to those who had immigrated to the United States. "There are a lot of stupid people in India but they don't come here," he explained, adding that people should build up their own societies rather
than seek to emigrate and that after his education ended he himself returned to India, becoming its first logician and laying groundwork for future generations of Indian researchers.

Posts

Parikh's doctoral students include Alessandra Carbone and David Ellerman.

Academic and research appointments