PALO ALTO — Paul Joseph Cohen, a leading mathematician who won several of the world’s most prestigious math awards, has died. He was 72.

Cohen died Friday of a rare lung disease, according to Stanford University, where he taught for four decades.

Cohen’s honors were astonishing feats, considering that two prizes were from completely different branches of mathematics.

In 1964 he won the American Mathematical Society’s Bocher Prize for analysis, and in 1966 he won the Fields Medal — the math world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize — for logic. Cohen won the 1967 National Medal of Science for his work in logic, and he was an honorary foreign member of the London Mathematical Society.

“Paul Cohen was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century,” said Princeton Professor Peter Sarnak, who received his doctorate from Stanford in 1980 under Cohen. “He made mathematics look simple and unified.”

Cohen grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1950. He attended Brooklyn College from 1950 to 1953 but left before receiving a bachelor’s degree, going directly to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he received a master’s degree in 1954 and a doctorate in 1958.

Cohen joined Stanford in 1961 as an assistant professor of mathematics. He became a full professor in 1964. He retired in 2004 but continued teaching until this quarter.

“He had a very special style, full of enthusiasm and very hands on,” said Angus MacIntyre, a professor of applied logic at Queen Mary, University of London. “He was dauntingly clever.”

Cohen met his Swedish wife, Christina, on a cruise from Stockholm to Leningrad in 1962. He is survived by his wife; sister Tobel Cosiol of San Jose, Costa Rica; brother Ruby Cassel of Brooklyn, N.Y.; twin sons Eric and Steven Cohen of Los Angeles; and son Charles Cohen and his wife, Andreea, of Boston.

———On the Net:

http://www.paulcohen.org