J. Richard Büchi

Abstract Julius Richard Büchi was born in Porto Allegre, Brazil, on 31 January 1924 to Swiss parents and as a citizen of Zell, Switzerland. He grew up in Switzerland and in 1948 received a doctoral degree in mathematics from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich; his thesis supervisor was Paul Bernays. After graduation he moved almost immediately to the United States and had a number of academic appointments, among others at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1963 he became Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Purdue University and retained that position until his death in 1984. Büchi did important work in mathematical logic and, relatedly, theoretical computer science. Dirk Siefkes states in his 1985 that Büchi is “probably best known for using finite automata as combinatorial devices to obtain strong results on decidability and definability in monadic second-order theories and extending the method to infinite combinatorial tools”. Büchi’s papers were collected by Mac Lane and Siefkes in Büchi 1990; his posthumously published book Finite automata, their algebras and grammars was edited by Siefkes.