Mathematician:Andrzej Mostowski
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Mathematician
Polish mathematician, best known for the Mostowski Collapse Lemma.
Nationality
Polish
History
- Born: 1 November 1913, Lwów, in what was then Austria-Hungary
- 1914: His father died in the war
- Winter 1914: Went to Zakopane for a vacation but had to stay because of the war
- 1920: Moved to Warsaw
- 1923: Entered the Stefan Batory Gymnasium in Warsaw
- 1930: Developed a serious illness
- 1931: Completed studies at the Gymnasium, entered University of Warsaw
- 1937: Studied in Vienna and Zurich
- 1939: Awarded Ph.D. at Warsaw
- After 1 September 1939 (invasion of Poland by Germany): became an accountant
- 1942 to 1944: Taught in the Underground Warsaw University
- September 1944: Married Maria Matuszewska
- Late 1944: Escaped being sent to a concentration camp
- 1945: Went to Cracow, where he worked at Silesian Polytechnic, then Jagellonian University
- Jan-Sept 1946: Acting professor at Lodz
- Sept 1946: Appointed as an acting professor at Warsaw University
- 1947: Made an extraordinary professor
- 1948-49: At the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
- 1949: Appointed as head of the division for the foundations of mathematics at the Mathematics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences
- 1951: Made an ordinary professor
- 1952: Appointed dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Warsaw University
- 1953: Head of the Department of Algebra
- 1958-59: At the University of California at Berkeley
- 1968: Ended position as head of foundations of mathematics at Polish Academy of Sciences, took up similar position at Warsaw University
- 1969-70: At All Souls College, Oxford
- Summer of 1975: In the United States, at Berkeley and Stanford
- Died: 22 August 1975: En route to Ontario, Canada, stopped in Vancouver to deliver an invited lecture at Simon Fraser University but died suddenly and unexpectedly
Theorems and Inventions
- Mostowski Collapse Lemma
- Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski Theorem
- Fraenkel-Mostowski Permutation Method (with Abraham Halevi Fraenkel)
- Kleene-Mostowski Hierarchy (with Stephen Cole Kleene)
Results named for Andrzej Mostowski can be found here.
Publications
- 1939: On the Independence of Finitenesss Definitions in a System of Logic (Ph.D. thesis)
- 1945: Axiom of choice for finite sets (habilitation thesis for Jagellonian University)
- 1946: On undecidable propositions in formalized systems of mathematics (Polish)
- 1948: Mathematical Logic
- 1952: Theory of sets (with Kazimierz Kuratowski)
- 1956: Theory of sets (2nd Edition) (with Kazimierz Kuratowski)
- 1953: Undecidable theories (with Alfred Tarski and Raphael Mitchel Robinson)
- 1953: Elements of higher algebra: Volume 1 (with Marceli Stark)
- 1954: Elements of higher algebra: Volume 2 (with Marceli Stark)
- 1964: Widerspruchsfreiheit und Unabhängigkeit der Kontinuumhypothese (Independence and Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis)