Public Biography
Dr. Leonard Prask is a professor of pure mathematics at the University of Chicago, where he holds the Alonzo Church Chair in Foundations of Mathematics. His research focuses on transfinite set theory, large cardinal axioms, and the structure of infinite ordinals. He has published more than sixty peer-reviewed papers in journals including Annals of Mathematics, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, and Fundamenta Mathematicae.
Dr. Prask received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1998 under the supervision of a logician whose name he insists should not be printed without the proper diacritical marks, which no American newspaper has ever rendered correctly. He completed postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study and joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2003.
He is the author of Beyond Aleph-Null: Ordinal Hierarchies and the Continuum Problem (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which was reviewed in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society as “rigorous, important, and almost certainly unread by anyone outside the field.” He has received the Sloan Research Fellowship and the AMS Centennial Fellowship.
Dr. Prask is married to Karen Prask, a compliance attorney. They have one daughter, Meredith, a sophomore at Northwestern University. He lives in Hyde Park, Chicago.
Notable Positions
Dr. Prask has become publicly associated with a sustained objection to the colloquial use of the word “infinite,” a campaign he describes as “terminologically necessary” and which his colleagues have described using other terms. He maintains a detailed log of misuses, which as of March 2026 contained 1,247 entries.