Haskell Brooks Curry was an American logician whose work on the foundations of mathematics became central to how programmers think about types and functions. The MacTutor archive records that he was born on September 12, 1900, in Millis, Massachusetts, and died on September 1, 1982, in State College, Pennsylvania.
His major contribution was combinatory logic, a system that analyzes how functions are applied and how variables can be eliminated entirely in favor of a small set of basic combinators. According to MacTutor, this work built on the substitution rules in Whitehead and Russell’s “Principia Mathematica,” and Curry developed it into a foundational discipline. He helped found the Association for Symbolic Logic in 1936 and served as its president from 1938 to 1940.
Curry’s name attaches to several ideas that working programmers meet daily. The functional programming language Haskell is named in his honor, the technique of turning a multi-argument function into a chain of single-argument functions is called “currying,” and the correspondence between logical proofs and typed programs is known as the Curry-Howard correspondence. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on type theory places his combinatory logic among the roots of the modern study of typed systems.
His published texts, including “Combinatory Logic” (1958, with Robert Feys) and “Foundations of Mathematical Logic” (1963), carried these ideas to later generations of logicians and computer scientists.