“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.” So said Bertrand Russell, a man widely thought on to be one of the Twentieth Century’s premier logicians. Mr. Petr Stepanek is a constant traveler through today’s sculpture gardens of Mathematical Logic, Logic Programming, Lambda Calculus, and Set Theory. He is a Professor of Theoretical Computer Science, Doctor of Science, and RNDr., the latter being a Doctor of Natural Sciences, (rerum naturalium doctor) which is an academic degree awarded after passing a rigorous examination and defense of thesis mainly on science faculties, by Czech and Slovak Universities.

To get a better theory of Mr. Stepanek, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of his areas of expertise. Mathematical Logic is a subfield of mathematics that is tied to computer science, and one of its divisions is set theory. The study of sets or Set Theory, formalized using first-order logic, is the most common foundational system for mathematics, and it is a branch of mathematics in its own right, with an active research community. Contemporary research into set theory includes a diverse collection of topics, ranging from the structure of the real number line to the study of the consistency of large cardinals. In mathematical logic and computer science, lambda calculus is a formal system for function definition, function application and recursion. Ideas from lambda calculus have found application in the fields of logic, recursion theory (computability), and linguistics, and have played an important role in the development of the theory of programming languages.

Theoretical computer science is the collection of topics of computer science that focuses on the more abstract, logical and mathematical aspects of computing, such as the theory of computation, analysis of algorithms, and semantics of programming languages. This is the subject area that Mr. Petr Stepanek instructs his students in at Charles University located in Prague, Czech Republic. Mr. Stepanek has quite a history here. He has been teaching at the university for over 43 years. Charles University has quite a history in its own right. It was founded in 1348 and is one of the oldest universities in the world. Today this university belongs to the most eminent educational and scientific establishments in the Czech Republic which are recognized in both the European and global context. It is an outstanding cultural institution due to its scientific and pedagogical results and its unique historical tradition.

Mr. Stepanek, as well as being an esteemed member of the Department of Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematical Logic, is a member of the American Mathematical Society. He is particularly interested in client/server and relational database design using Oracle, Sybase, and MS-SQL Server.

Prof. RNDr. Petr Stepanek, DrSc., can be found on the Madison Who’s Who Directory where he is looking forward to networking with you.

www.cuni.cz