Lou van den Dries è Professore presso il Dipartimento di Matematica dell'Università di Illinois a Urbana-Champaign.
Over the past ten years Professor van den Dries has applied metamathematical (model-theoretic) methods to understand one of the basic objects of mathematics, the real number system R, and obtain large families of subsets of R that have good topological and geometric properties. In the early 1980s he isolated the crucial “logical” property O-minimality that has since become a recognized area within model theory. In addition to his work on O-minimality, he has made fundamental contributions to such areas as the model theory of analytic functions on the p-adic numbers, decidability of the algebraic integers, and the logic of finite fields.
Currently he serves as editor of the Illinois Journal of Mathematics and of The Journal of Symbolic Logic. His doctoral dissertation remains a classic in the applications of logic to algebra.
