Gary Mar

Gary Mar won a Rudolf Carnap dissertation essay prize at UCLA in 1983 and was the last Ph.D. student of Alonzo Church. Mar is co-author with Donald Kalish and Richard Montague of Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning (second edition, OUP). Mar has been the founding director of the Stony Brook University Philosophy Department Logic Lab since 1986. The Logic Lab has generated research discussed in Scientific American and published in The Philosophical Computer (MIT) by Grim, Mar, and St. Denis. Mar was a co-editor with Patrick Grim and others at Stony Brook University for over a decade. 

In 1996 Mar was a catalyst for what was, at the time, the largest donation in the history of the public education system in New York State, the Charles B. Wang Asian American Center, which opened October 22, 2002. Mar has been the founding director of the Asian American Center Bridge since 1996 and created over 75 conferences, special events and outreaches to the Asian American communities on Long Island and national advocacy groups, being one of 19 leaders from across to country to be selected in 2006 by the JACL and OCA to meet with Asian American leaders in Washington D. C.

Mar’s advocacy for Asian American Philosophy led to the expansion of a committee of the APA (American Philosophical Association) to include Asian American philosophy and philosophers in 1997, and he subsequently served a term as the Chair of that committee.  He also has served on the APA Committees on Diversity and the Committee on Philosophy and Computers.

The APA sponsored the publication of a CD “Angel Island Reflections” containing a decade’s worth of documentaries and student multimedia projects. This CD was distributed at the 100-year anniversary of Angel Island in 2010, when it was restored and established as a national historic landmark to accompany a book commissioned by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation by Erica Lee and Judy Yung Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, the first comprehensive history of the Angel Island Immigration, which contained archival research and personal stories of immigrants detained there from 1910 – 1940.

Returning to his research in Logic and the Philosophy of Mathematics, Language, Religion, Computation, and Time, Mar attended the historic Gödel Centenary “Horizons of Truth” in Vienna in 2006. Approached by the Mathematical Intelligencer to write a review of Torkel Franzen’s Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to is Uses and Abuses the obtained advice of Solomon Feferman, the editor-in-chief of the monumental Gödel Collected Works. Mar’s “Hao Wang’s Logical Journey” [2015] for the Journal of Chinese Philosophy was an essay that bridging research in Asian American philosophy and computational logic was about the unduly acknowledged work of Hao Wang and his intellectual friendship with Kurt Godel. Hanna Tierney, Wang’s widow, provided photos and personal insights for this essay, which has recently been translated into Chinese.

In 2019 Matthias Baaz, Professor of Mathematical Logic at TU Wien and one of the organizers of the Gödel Centenary, invited Mar to help with the 2019 conference sponsored by the Kurt Gödel Society of Vienna “Does the Future Lie in the Past?” 

During the Covid lock down, Gary Mar with his wife Rosemary Ashton as layout designer produced Thinking Matters: Critical Thinking as Creative Problem Solving (World Scientific), a book inspired by Martin Gardner which was a best-seller featured at the 16th Gathering 4 Gardner (G4G16) in San Francisco from February 2026. Mar received a faculty fellowship from 2022-24 for “A Year of Magical Thinking” to receive a course release to develop “Mathematical Games Illustrating Computational and Logical Thinking". These ideas will be incorporated in a forthcoming book under contract with World Science with the working title: Gödel’s Ontological Dreams: An Incomplete Guide to his Theorems and Philosophical Ideas.

Mar was invited to contribute a presentation to a conference “a Gödel and Kant on Mathematics and Physics” sponsored by the University of Tübingen, Germany, 2023. Gary Mar was awarded a 2025 prize from the Gödel Freundekreis for an essay “Gödel’s Ontological Dreams: Mathematical Realism, Temporal Unrealism, and Gödel’s God”.

Mar has been a contributing editor for APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computing. And currently serves on the APA Committee for the K. Jon Barwise Prize for Computing and Philosophy. He has been invited to chair a session at the Pacific APA in March 2027 for the Barwise lecture for next year’s recipient for this prize.

Mar is a former member of the Community Advisory Board to WNET/WLIW public television in the New York Metro Area and an Emeritus Human Rights Commissioner for Suffolk County Long Island. At Stony Brook University Gary Mar has been awarded the President’s and Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Alumni Association Outstanding Professor Award, and the Chancellor’s Award to Excellence in University Service.