Victor W. Marek

Victor W. Marek, formerly Wiktor Marek (born 22 March 1943) is a Polish mathematician and computer scientist working in the field of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic.

Victor W. Marek, born March 22, 1943, studied Mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Warsaw University. He received the MSc degree in mathematics in 1964, PhD in mathematics in 1968 (Andrzej Mostowski, Advisor), and DSc in mathematics in 1972, all from Warsaw University.

During 1970/71 Dr. Marek was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utrecht, Holland (Dirk van Dalen, advisor). In 1967/68, and in the academic years 1973–1975 worked as a researcher at the Mathematical Institute of Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. During the academic years 1979/1980 and 1982/1983 worked at the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research. In 1976 became an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Warsaw University.

In 1983 became a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky. During the academic year 1989–1990 a Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. In 2001/2002 visitor at the Department of Mathematics of University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Marek supervised large number of M.Sc. theses and projects. He was an advisor of 16 PhD candidates both in mathematics and computer science. Specifically, he advised dissertations in mathematics of: Małgorzata Dubiel-Lachlan, Roman Kossak, Adam Krawczyk, Tadeusz Kreid, Roman Murawski, Andrzej Pelc, Zygmunt Ratajczyk, Marian Srebrny, and Zygmunt Vetulani. In Computer Science his advisees included V. K. Cody Bumgardner, Waldemar W. Koczkodaj, Witold Lipski, Joseph Oldham, Inna Pivkina, Michał Sobolewski, and Paweł Traczyk, oraz Zygmunt Vetulani. All these individuals worked in various institutions of higher education in Canada, France, Poland, and United States.

Dr. Marek investigated a number of areas within the foundations of mathematics, for instance infinitary combinatorics (large cardinals), metamathematics of set theory, the hierarchy of constructible sets, models of second-order arithmetic, the impredicative theory of classes Kelley–Morse,. He proved that the so-called Fraïssé conjecture (second-order theories of denumerable ordinals are all different) is entailed by Gödel's Axiom of Constructibility. Together with Marian Srebrny, he studied properties of gaps in constructible universe.

Dr. Marek studied logical foundations of computer science. In the early 1970s, collaborating with Zdzislaw Pawlak studied Pawlak's Information Storage and Retrieval Systems a concept studied by a group of researchers, especially in Eastern Europe. These systems were, essentially a single-table relational databases, but unlike Codd's relational databases were bags rather than sets of records. These investigations, in turn, led to introduction by Pawlak of the concept of rough set, studied by Marek and Pawlak in. The concept of rough set, tying computer science, statistics, topology, universal algebra, combinatorics, and modal logic, turned out to be an expressive language for describing, and especially manipulating, incomplete information.

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