Theodore Slaman

Theodore Allen Slaman (born April 17, 1954) is an American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and his work is primarily in the field of recursion theory. Slaman, in collaboration with W. Hugh Woodin, formulated the Bi-interpretability Conjecture concerning the Turing degrees. This conjecture posits that the partial order of Turing degrees is logically equivalent to second-order arithmetic. Their research demonstrated that this conjecture is equivalent to the absence of nontrivial automorphisms of the Turing degrees, and they also established limits on possible automorphisms by proving that any such automorphism must be arithmetically definable.