William Lawvere

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William Lawvere 2003

Francis William Lawvere , called William Lawvere, (born February 9, 1937 in Muncie , Indiana ) is an American mathematician who studied category theory and algebra . Along with Alexander Grothendieck, he is the founder of the topos theory .

Life

Lawvere studied at Indiana University (Bachelor 1960) and received his doctorate in 1963 from Columbia University with Samuel Eilenberg ( Functorial semantics of algebraic theories ). In his dissertation he introduced the concept of the category of categories . Before that, he studied model theory and axiomatic set theory for a year at the University of California, Berkeley , with Alfred Tarski and Dana Scott . 1962/63 he was a systems analyst at Litton Industries and 1963/64 Assistant Professor at Reed College in Portland (Oregon) . From 1964 to 1967 he was at the ETH Zurich . During this time he came into contact with the abstract concepts of algebraic geometry by Alexander Grothendieck through a lecture by Pierre Gabriel at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach . In 1966 he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago at Saunders MacLane . In 1968/69 he was Associate Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with Alex Heller. In 1968/69 he did research again at ETH Zurich as a Sloan Research Fellow , where he worked with Myles Tierney . From 1972 to 1974 he was at Dalhousie University and from 1974 professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo , where he retired in 2000. In 1971/72 he was visiting professor at Aarhus University and from 1972 to 1974 he lectured at the Italian National Research Institute in Perugia .

Lawvere also applied category theory to continuum mechanics after attending lectures on it as a student with one of the leading experts in the field, Clifford Truesdell . His turn to category theory also happened in his connection with Truesdell, when he gave lectures on functional analysis on his behalf and read a comment in John L. Kelley's General Topology in which he used the category-theoretical approach as an increase to the current local and global approaches as galactic Access described.

In addition to category theory and applications in continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, he also deals with metric spaces and synthetic differential geometry as part of his program in categorical dynamics .

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( Quantifiers and sheaves ). He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

He has been married to Fatima Fenaroli since 1966 and has five children.

Fonts

  • with Stephen Schanuel Conceptual mathematics: a first introduction to categories , Cambridge University Press 1997
  • Editor with Stephen Schanuel Categories in Continuum Physics (Buffalo, NY 1982) , Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Volume 1174, 1986, ISBN 3-540-16096-5
  • with Robert Rosebrugh: Sets for Mathematics , Cambridge University Press, 2003
  • Comments on the development of topos theory , in Jean-Paul Pier Development of mathematics 1950-2000 , Birkhäuser 2000

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical data from American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2006
  2. ^ William Lawvere in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / name used
  3. ^ Lawvere Functorial semantics of algebraic theories , Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 50, 1963, pp. 869-872
personal data
SURNAME Lawvere, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lawvere, Francis William (full name); Lawvere, Francis W .; Lawvere, Bill
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Muncie , Indiana