Paul Cohen's reputation as a mathematician has been earned at least partly because of his ability to work successfully in a number of very different fields of mathematics. He received the highly regarded Bôcher Prize of the American Mathematical Society, for example, in 1964 for his research on the Littlewood problem. Two years later he was awarded perhaps the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal, for his research on one of David Hilbert's "23 most important problems" in mathematics, proving the independence of the continuum hypothesis.

Paul Joseph Cohen was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on April 2, 1934, but his childhood and adolescence were spent in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Abraham Cohen and the former Minnie Kaplan. Both parents had immigrated to the United States from western Russia (now part of Poland) while they were still teenagers. Cohen's father became a successful grocery...