Newton da Costa
Brazilian philosopher and mathematician
Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa (16 September 1929 – 16 April 2024) was a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher, best known for establishing and pioneering the field of paraconsistent logic. Born in Curitiba, he studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba and the title of his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation was Topological spaces and continuous functions.
Work
Paraconsistency
Da Costa's international recognition came especially through his work on paraconsistent logic and its application to various fields such as philosophy, law, computing, and artificial intelligence. He was one of the founders of this non-classical logic. In addition, he constructed the theory of quasi-truth that constitutes a generalization of Alfred Tarski's theory of truth, and applied it to the foundations of science.
Other fields; foundations of physics
The scope of his research also includes model theory, generalized Galois theory, axiomatic foundations of quantum theory and relativity, complexity theory, and abstract logics. Da Costa significantly contributed to the philosophy of logic, paraconsistent modal logics, ontology, and philosophy of science. He served as the President of the Brazilian Association of Logic and the Director of the Institute of Mathematics at the University of São Paulo. He received many awards and held numerous visiting scholarships at universities and centers of research in all continents.
Da Costa and physicist Francisco Antônio Dória axiomatized large portions of classical physics with the help of Patrick Suppes' predicates.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5365379. VIAF identifies the subject as 91306871. The Library of Congress control number is n81127089. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 2024 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Newton da Costa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.