Michael Makkai ( hu, Makkai Mihály; 24 June 1939 in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

) is

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

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 ...

of Hungarian origin, specializing in

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...

. He works in model theory, category theory, algebraic logic,

type theory In mathematics, logic, and computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system, and in general type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a fou ...

and the theory of

topoi In mathematics, a topos (, ; plural topoi or , or toposes) is a category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space (or more generally: on a site). Topoi behave much like the category of sets and possess a noti ...

Career

Academic biography

Makkai was awarded his PhD from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 1966, having been supervised by

Rózsa Péter Rózsa Péter, born Rózsa Politzer, (17 February 1905 – 16 February 1977) was a Hungarian mathematician and logician. She is best known as the "founding mother of recursion theory". Early life and education Péter was born in Budapest, ...

and Andrzej Mostowski. He then worked at the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1974 and 2010, he was professor of mathematics at

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous ...

, retiring in 2010. He is also an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1995).

Work

With

Leo Harrington Leo Anthony Harrington (born May 17, 1946) is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who works in recursion theory, model theory, and set theory. Having retired from being a Mathematician, Professor Leo Harrington is ...

and Saharon Shelah he proved the Vaught conjecture for ω-stable theories. With Robert Paré he further developed the theory of

Accessible Categories The theory of accessible categories is a part of mathematics, specifically of category theory. It attempts to describe categories in terms of the "size" (a cardinal number) of the operations needed to generate their objects. The theory originates i ...

. Makkai has an

Erdős number The Erdős number () describes the "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual ...

of 1, having published "Some Remarks on Set Theory, X" with Paul Erdős in 1966.

Selected publications

* M. Makkai, G. E. Reyes: ''First Order Categorical Logic, Lecture Notes in Mathematics'', 611, Springer, 1977, viii+301 pp. * L. Harrington, M. Makkai, S. Shelah: A proof of Vaught's conjecture for ω-stable theories, '' Israel Journal of Mathematics'', 49(1984), 259–280. * Michael Makkai, Robert Paré: ''Accessible categories: the foundations of categorical model theory''. Contemporary Mathematics, 104. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1989. viii+176 pp. , * M. Makkai: ''Duality and Definability in First Order Logic'', Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 503, 1993, ISSN 0065-9266.

References

External links

* Makkai'
homepage
at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences * Makkai'
homepage
at McGill University {{DEFAULTSORT:Makkai, Michael 1939 births Living people Canadian mathematicians Hungarian emigrants to Canada 20th-century Hungarian mathematicians 21st-century Hungarian mathematicians Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences