Johann Makowsky
Johann A. Makowsky is a Hungarian-born naturalised Swiss mathematician who works in mathematical logic and the logical foundations of computer science and combinatorics. He studied at ETH Zurich from 1967–73. He was a student in Zürich of Ernst Specker and Hans Läuchli in mathematical logic,, of Beno Eckmann and Volker Strassen, and in Warsaw of Andrzej Mostowski and Witek Marek, where he spent 1972 as an exchange student. Makowsky held visiting positions at the Banach Center in Warsaw, Stanford University, Simon Fraser University, University of Florence, MIT, Lausanne University and ETH Zurich. He held regular positions at the Free University of Berlin and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology where he was a full professor.
Among his various contributions are:
- In model theory, the solution of two open problems in categoricity theory and his study of logics with various interpolation and compactness properties.
- In database theory, the first undecidability result of the consequence problem for database dependencies, his work unifying the entity–relationship model and the relational model of databases, and his work on Boyce–Codd normal form.
- In logic programming, his fundamental studies of Horn formulas and their complexity
- In graph algorithms, his unifying approach to tree-width and clique-width via model theory, leading to a general theory of graph polynomials and their definability in various logical formalisms.
Since 2016, he is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion, and continues his research and teaching and supervising graduate students