Rohit Jivanlal Parikh

Rohit Jivanlal Parikh (born November 20, 1936) is an Indian-American mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory.

He is a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York (CUNY).

Parikh worked on topics like vagueness, ultrafinitism, belief revision, logic of knowledge, game theory and social software (social procedure).

This last area seeks to combine techniques from logic, computer science (especially logic of programs) and game theory to understand the structure of social algorithms.

Rohit Parikh was married from 1968 to 1994 to Carol Parikh (née Geris), who is best known for her stories and biography of Oscar Zariski, The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski.

Parikh is a nontheist opposing abortions.

To fight abortions he joined the Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League.

In 2018, a Facebook post by Parikh, called for deportation of all illegal immigrants, writing, "I do believe that everyone who is illegally here should be deported but that the US should support them in their home country."

Parikh further claims in the Facebook post that Hispanic immigrants are insufficiently educated compared to Indian immigrants like him, leading Brooklyn College students to public protests and calls for the university to discipline him.

The president of Brooklyn College Michelle Anderson called his remarks "antithetical to the fundamental values of Brooklyn College."

Defending his position in an interview to a CW-affiliate WPIX, Parikh claimed he had not meant that Hispanics in general were dumber than Indians in general, but rather that his comparison of intellectual abilities of Hispanics and Indians had applied only to those who had immigrated to the United States.

"There are a lot of stupid people in India but they don't come here," he explained.

Parikh's doctoral students include Alessandra Carbone and David Ellerman.