David Kaplan ’56, Ph.D. ’64

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David Kaplan's lifelong love is logic, love that exceeds in time even the bond with his life mate, Renee, whom he met as an undergraduate at UCLA in a class learning … logic. Since 1964, Kaplan has been on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Philosophy. He quickly became a world leader in philosophical logic and the philosophy of language. In the early 1990s, Kaplan was offered an opportunity to take early retirement. He did the math and concluded that continuing to teach would be economically disadvantageous, but it was a small price to pay for the privilege of doing something he enjoyed so much, so his fifty-year love-in at UCLA continues. In 2000, he was named by the publication UCLA TODAY as one of UCLA's “teachers of the century.” Within the past 15 years, Kaplan developed a revolutionary idea to mechanize the teaching that has to do with executing formal proofs, an innovative project called Logic 2000, which is now used at universities worldwide.

Logic 2000 is a system for computer and Internet assisted classroom instruction. Work done in class appears within the program the next day, freeing students to pay attention to the discussion rather than spend their classroom time taking notes. With software providing immediate feedback to student assignments, it enhances and speeds up the learning process. Instant feedback prevents errors from becoming ingrained. Before the use of the logic software began, about 25 percent of the students would write a perfect first midterm exam. There was a lot to learn and students were given a long time to learn it. By 2003, 60 percent achieved similar proficiency after only three weeks of class.