Richard M. Montague, a logician who taught in the Philosophy Department at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1955 until his premature death in 1971, is probably best known for his contributions to linguistic semantics, although he also made important contributions to mathematical logic and philosophy.

Montague was born in 1930. He attended the University of California at Berkeley both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, concentrating not only in mathematics and philosophy, but in Semitic languages. Working with Alfred Tarski, he completed a doctoral dissertation in 1957 entitled "Contributions to the foundations of axiomatic set theory." By that time he had published a large number of papers in various areas of mathematical logic.

Montague's interests in mathematical logic were general and included set theory, proof theory, model theory, and abstract recursion theory. One early theme in his work in mathematical logic concerned the consequences...