Andrzej Mostowski | |
---|---|
Born |
Lemberg, Austria-Hungary |
1 November 1913
Died | 22 August 1975 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
(aged 61)
Nationality | Poland |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Warsaw |
Alma mater | University of Warsaw |
Doctoral advisor |
Kazimierz Kuratowski Alfred Tarski |
Doctoral students |
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht Victor W. Marek Moshé Machover Helena Rasiowa Roman Sikorski Paweł Zbierski |
Andrzej Mostowski (1 November 1913 – 22 August 1975) was a Polish mathematician. He is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma.
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.
This 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 work during that time was on first order logic and model theory.
His son Tadeusz is also a mathematician working on differential geometry. With Krzysztof Kurdyka and Adam Parusinski, Tadeusz Mostowski solved René Thom's gradient conjecture in 2000.