Andrzej Mostowski

Andrzej Mostowski 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.

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 [education in Poland during World War II|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.
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.

Works

Books

1968 & 1976: Set Theory. With an Introduction to Descriptive Set Theory, Studies in Logic and Foundations of Mathematics #86, North Holland,
1952: Sentences Undecidable in Formalized Arithmetic: An Exposition of the Theory of Kurt Godel, North-Holland, Amsterdam,
1969: Constructible Sets with Applications, North-Holland, Amsterdam.

Papers

Andrzej Mostowski, Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 32, No.1, ss. 201-252,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 34, No. 1, ss. 81-112,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Colloquium Mathematicae Vol. 1, No. 3, ss. 195-196,.
Casimir Kuratowski, Andrzej Mostowski, , Colloquium Mathematicae Vol. 2, No. 3-4, ss. 212-215,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Colloquium Mathematicae Vol. 2, No. 3-4, ss. 216-219,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 17, No. 1, ss. 1-31,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 39, No. 1, ss. 133-158,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 40, No. 1, ss. 56-61,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 42, No. 1, ss. 125-140,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 42, No. 2, ss. 259-270,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 42, No. 2, ss. 271-275,.
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht, Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae, Vol. 43, No. 1, ss. 50-68.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 44, No. 1, ss. 1-11,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 44, No. 1, ss. 12-36,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 44, No. 1, ss. 37-51,.
Andrzej Grzegorczyk, Andrzej Mostowski and Czesław Ryll-Nardzewski, , Journal of Symbolic Logic Vol. 23, No. 2, ss. 188-206,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Colloquium Mathematicae Vol. 6, No. 1, ss. 207-208,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 49, No. 2, ss. 205-232,.
Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 50, No. 2, ss. 165-190,.
Yoshindo Suzuki, Andrzej Mostowski, , Fundamenta Mathematicae Vol. 65, No. 1, ss. 83-93,.