Mathematician:Andrzej Mostowski

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 )
 * Kleene-Mostowski Hierarchy (with )

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 )
 * 1956: Theory of sets (2nd Edition) (with )


 * 1953: Undecidable theories (with and )
 * 1953: Elements of higher algebra: Volume 1 (with )
 * 1954: Elements of higher algebra: Volume 2 (with )
 * 1964: Widerspruchsfreiheit und Unabhängigkeit der Kontinuumhypothese (Independence and Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis)