Charles Archibald Blake (November 24, 1906 - January 7, 1971), name officially changed to Archie Blake [1] was an American mathematician.He is well known for the Blake canonical form, a normal form for expressions in propositional logic.In order to compute the canonical form, he moreover introduced the concept of consensus, which was a precursor of the resolution principle, today a common technique in automated theorem proving.
In 1930, he became a member of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).[2] [3] He presented his canonical form at the AMS meeting at Columbia University on 29 Oct 1932.[4] In 1937, this work lead to a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, supervised by Raymond Walter Barnard.
He worked for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C., from 1936 (or earlier) as a mathematician,[5] since 1938 as an Assistant Mathematician,[6] and since 1939 as an Associated Mathematician.[7] [8] In 1946, he was appointed a Senior Statistician in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, Washington, D.C.[9] He also worked for the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York.From there, he changed in 1954 to the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Baltimore, Md., where he became an Advisory Engineer.[10] In 1956, he moved from Westinghouse to the Bendix Aviation Corporation, as a Systems Staff Mathematician.[11] In 1960, he became a Manager of the Analysis Section of Raytheon in Sudbury, Massachusetts.[12]