Andrzej Mostowski

Andrzej Mostowski (1 November 1913 – 22 August 1975) was a Polish mathematician. He is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma.

Andrzej Mostowski
Mostowski in 1973
Born(1913-11-01)1 November 1913
Died22 August 1975(1975-08-22) (aged 61)
NationalityPoland
Alma materUniversity of Warsaw
Known forArithmetical hierarchy
Mostowski collapse lemma
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Warsaw
Doctoral advisorKazimierz Kuratowski
Alfred Tarski
Doctoral studentsAndrzej Ehrenfeucht
Moshé Machover
Helena Rasiowa
Roman Sikorski

Biography

Born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, Mostowski entered University of Warsaw in 1931. He was influenced by Kuratowski, Lindenbaum, and Tarski. His Ph.D. came in 1939, officially directed by Kuratowski but in practice directed by Tarski who was a young lecturer at that time.

He became an accountant after the German invasion of Poland but continued working in the Underground Warsaw University. After the Warsaw uprising of 1944, the Nazis tried to put him in a concentration camp. With the help of some Polish nurses, he escaped to a hospital, choosing to take bread with him rather than his notebook containing his research. Some of this research he reconstructed after the War, however much of it remained lost.

His work was largely on recursion theory and undecidability. From 1946 until his death in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he worked at the University of Warsaw. Much of his work, during that time, was on first order logic and model theory.

His son Tadeusz is also a mathematician working on differential geometry.[1] With Krzysztof Kurdyka and Adam Parusinski, Tadeusz Mostowski solved René Thom's gradient conjecture in 2000.

See also

References

  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2011-06-13. Retrieved 2010-02-23.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)

Bibliography

Books by Mostowski

  • Kuratowski, Kazimierz; Mostowski, Andrzej (1976) [1968], Set theory. With an introduction to descriptive set theory, Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, 86 (Second ed.), Amsterdam-New York-Oxford: North-Holland Publishing Co., MR 0485384
  • Andrzej Mostowski, Sentences Undecidable in Formalized Arithmetic: An Exposition of the Theory of Kurt Godel, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1952, ISBN 978-0313231513
  • Andrezj Mostowski, Constructible Sets with Applications, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1969.

Papers by Mostowski


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