Heinrich Kleisli (; October 19, 1930 – April 5, 2011) was a

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland *Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri *Swiss, North Carolina * Swiss, West Virginia *Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses * Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports * Swiss Internation ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

. He is the namesake of several constructions in

category theory Category theory is a general theory of mathematical structures and their relations that was introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane in the middle of the 20th century in their foundational work on algebraic topology. Nowadays, ca ...

, including the Kleisli category and Kleisli triples. He is also the namesake of the Kleisli Query System, a tool for integration of heterogeneous databases developed at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

. Kleisli earned his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich in 1960, having been supervised by

Beno Eckmann Beno Eckmann (31 March 1917 – 25 November 2008) was a Swiss mathematician who made contributions to algebraic topology, homological algebra, group theory, and differential geometry. Life Born in Bern, Eckmann received his master's degree from ...

and

Ernst Specker Ernst Paul Specker (11 February 1920, Zurich – 10 December 2011, Zurich) was a Swiss mathematician. Much of his most influential work was on Quine's New Foundations, a set theory with a universal set, but he is most famous for the Kochen ...

. His dissertation was on

homotopy In topology, a branch of mathematics, two continuous functions from one topological space to another are called homotopic (from grc, ὁμός "same, similar" and "place") if one can be "continuously deformed" into the other, such a defor ...

and

abelian categories In mathematics, an abelian category is a category in which morphisms and objects can be added and in which kernels and cokernels exist and have desirable properties. The motivating prototypical example of an abelian category is the category of ...

. He served as an associate professor at the

University of Ottawa The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottaw ...

before relocating to the

University of Fribourg The University of Fribourg (french: Université de Fribourg; german: Universität Freiburg) is a public university located in Fribourg, Switzerland. The roots of the university can be traced back to 1580, when the notable Jesuit Peter Canisi ...

in 1966. He became a full professor at Fribourg in 1967.

External links

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In memoriam: Prof. emerit. Heinrich Kleisli
* 2011 deaths 1930 births Swiss mathematicians ETH Zurich alumni University of Ottawa faculty Academic staff of the University of Fribourg {{Europe-mathematician-stub