Kochen was born in
Antwerp, Belgium, and escaped the Nazis with his family, thanks to a courageous Norwegian ship captain. Raised in England, he attended grammar school before moving to Canada. Kochen attended
McGill University and obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there. He moved to the US afterwards and received his Ph.D. (
Ultrafiltered Products and Arithmetical Extensions) from
Princeton University in 1958 under the direction of
Alonzo Church. Since 1967 he has been a member of Princeton's Department of Mathematics. He chaired the department from 1989 to 1992 and became the Henry Burchard Fine Professor in mathematics in 1994. During 1966–1967 and 1978–1979, Kochen was at the
Institute for Advanced Study. In 1967 he was awarded, together with
James Ax, the seventh
Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory for a series of three joint papers on
Diophantine problems involving
p-adic techniques. Kochen and Ax also co-authored the
Ax–Kochen theorem, an application of
model theory to
algebra. In 1967 Kochen and
Ernst Specker proved the
Kochen–Specker theorem in quantum mechanics and
quantum contextuality. In 2004 Kochen and
John Horton Conway proved the
free will theorem. The theorem states that if we have a certain amount of
free will, then, subject to certain assumptions, so must some
elementary particles. ==See also==