Andrzej Mostowski Explained

Andrzej Mostowski
Birth Date:1 November 1913
Birth Place:Lemberg, Austria-Hungary
Death Place:Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Nationality:Polish
Fields:Mathematics
Workplaces:University of Warsaw
Alma Mater:University of Warsaw
Doctoral Advisors:Kazimierz Kuratowski
Alfred Tarski
Doctoral Students:Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
Moshé Machover
Helena Rasiowa
Roman Sikorski
Victor W. Marek
Known For:Arithmetical hierarchy
Mostowski collapse lemma
Mostowski model

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

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.

In 1954 Mostowski was awarded by Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and in 1963 elected a real member of the PAS. After the World War II he supervised Rasiowa's both master and doctoral theses in logic and the foundations of mathematics.

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

Works

Books

Papers

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Wydział MIM UW - prof. Tadeusz Mostowski . 2010-02-23 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20110613111648/http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/wydzial/organizacja/pracownicy/tadeusz.mostowski.xml?LANG=en&para=&parb= . 2011-06-13 .