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Polish mathematician From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andrzej Mostowski (1 November 1913 – 22 August 1975) was a Polish mathematician. He worked primarily in logic and foundations of mathematics and is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma. He was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a representative of the Warsaw School of Mathematics.
Andrzej Mostowski | |
|---|---|
Mostowski in 1973 | |
| Born | 1 November 1913 |
| Died | 22 August 1975 (aged 61) |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Alma mater | University of Warsaw |
| Known for | Kleene–Mostowski hierarchy Mostowski collapse lemma Mostowski model |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Warsaw |
| Doctoral advisors | Kazimierz Kuratowski Alfred Tarski |
| Doctoral students | Andrzej Ehrenfeucht Moshé Machover Helena Rasiowa Roman Sikorski Victor W. Marek |
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. He also worked at the State Institute of Mathematics, which was incorporated into the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1952.[1]
His son Tadeusz is also a mathematician working on differential geometry.[2] With Krzysztof Kurdyka and Adam Parusinski, Tadeusz Mostowski solved René Thom's gradient conjecture in 2000.
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