Education
McKinsey received Bachelor of Surgery and Master of Surgery degrees from New York University and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley.
logician mathematician philosopher
McKinsey received Bachelor of Surgery and Master of Surgery degrees from New York University and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley.
He also made significant contributions to modal logic. He was a Blumenthal Research Fellow at New York University from 1936 to 1937 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1942 to 1943. He also taught at Montana State College, and in Nevada, then Oklahoma, and in 1947 he went "to a research group at Douglas Aircraft Corporation" that later became the Research and Development Corporation
McKinsey worked at Research and Development until he was fired in 1951.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation considered him a security risk because he was a homosexual, in spite of the fact that he was an open homosexual who had been in a committed relationship for years.
He complained to his superior "How can anyone threaten me with disclosure when everybody already knows?" From 1951 he taught at Stanford University, where he was later appointed a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy, where he worked with Patrick Suppes on the axiomatic foundations of classical mechanics. He committed suicide at his home in Palo Alto in 1953.