Jason Zesheng Chen

This is the academic homepage of Jason Zesheng Chen. I received a PhD in 2024 from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, UC Irvine, under the supervision of Toby Meadows. In September 2024, I started working for Intuit in technical product marketing and developer relations. See my LinkedIn for my industry work.

My research is best characterized as practice-informed technical philosophy. This means I study first and foremost the actual practices of technical specialists, in order to discern interesting threads among these practices that underlie particular aspects of the trade. To my way of thinking, this line of work relates to its attended disciplines in pretty much the same ways that a sports/chess pundit’s job relates to their subject matters.

More specifically, as a philosopher, I study how mathematicians (and sometimes linguists) go about their business, especially how they take something to be evidence, motivation, or justification for something else, and more importantly what that something else is. And as a logician, I focus on the relationship between computation, complexity, and exorbitantly large infinities: if an object can be easily computed/defined, must it behave nicely? Besides these, I also specialize in the history of set theory, especially descriptive set theory from its emergence to the present. Curiously, this line of research has made me somewhat competent in the history of mathematics, logic, and computer science in the Soviet Union.

Born and raised in Shenzhen, China, I went to University of Southern California as an undergrad, where I studied linguistics, philosophy, and Middle Eastern languages. I also do a bit of expository writing for the general public. Below you can find some of my social media.