At the
University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned a BA in philosophy in 1950, an MA in mathematics in 1953, and a
PhD in Philosophy in 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician
Alfred Tarski. Montague spent his entire career teaching in the
UCLA Department of Philosophy, where he supervised the dissertations of
Nino Cocchiarella and
Hans Kamp. Montague wrote on the foundations of
logic and
set theory, as would befit a student of Tarski. His PhD dissertation, titled
Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory, contained the first proof that all possible axiomatizations of the standard
axiomatic set theory ZFC must contain infinitely many axioms. In other words, ZFC cannot be finitely axiomatized. He pioneered a logical approach to natural language
semantics that became known as
Montague grammar. This approach to language has been especially influential among certain
computational linguists—perhaps more so than among more traditional
philosophers of language. In particular, Montague's influence lives on in grammar approaches like
categorial grammar (such as Unification Categorial Grammar, Left-Associative Grammar, or
Combinatory Categorial Grammar), which attempt a derivation of syntactic and semantic representation in tandem and the semantics of quantifiers, scope and discourse (
Hans Kamp, a student of Montague's, co-developed
Discourse Representation Theory). Montague was an accomplished organist and a successful real estate investor. He died violently in his own home; the crime is unsolved to this day.
Anita Feferman and
Solomon Feferman argue that he usually went to bars "cruising" and bringing people home with him. On the day that he was murdered, he brought home several people "for some kind of orgy", but they strangled him. ==In popular culture==