Jason Zesheng Chen's Homepage

My name is Zesheng Chen; my friends and family call me Jason. I am a PhD candidate at the Deparment of Logic and Philosophy of Science, UC Irvine. My advisor is Toby Meadows.

As a logician, I study the relationship between computation, complexity, and exorbitantly large infinities: if an object can be easily computed/defined, must it behave nicely? Such questions have intricate connections with what’s known as large cardinals. As a philosopher, I analyze the ways mathematicians (scientists) consider mathematical (scientific) facts as evidence for the merits of certain extra-mathematical (extra-scientific) theses.

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.

I’m currently conducting dissertation research on three things: 1. confluence phenomena in mathematics (“what do people mean when they say the have a Church-Turing Thesis for this or that?”), 2. the historical development of the theory of Borel equivalence relations (“when did descriptive set theorists turn to classification?”), and 3. relationship between forcing posets that add reals, and the computational power of the reals they add (“if a real number can be computed from a generic real, is it computable outright?”)

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. In my spare time I sometimes do a bit of expository writing for the general public. Below you can find some of my social media.