Michael Barr (born January 22, 1937) is an American mathematician who is the

Peter Redpath Peter Redpath (August 1, 1821 – February 1, 1894) was a Canadian businessman and philanthropist, closely associated with Redpath Sugar. Biography Redpath was born in Montreal, Lower Canada, the son of a Scottish immigrant, John Redpath, a ...

Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...

Early life and education

He was born in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

, and graduated from the 202nd class of Central High School in June 1954. He graduated from the

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

in February 1959 and received a PhD from the same school in June 1962.

Career

Barr taught at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

and the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

before coming to McGill in 1968. His earlier work was in

homological algebra Homological algebra is the branch of mathematics that studies homology (mathematics), homology in a general algebraic setting. It is a relatively young discipline, whose origins can be traced to investigations in combinatorial topology (a precurs ...

, but his principal research area for a number of years has been

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, cate ...

. He is well known to

theoretical computer scientist computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumscribe the th ...

s for his book ''Category Theory for Computing Science'' with Charles Wells, as well as for the development of *-autonomous categories and

Chu space Chu spaces generalize the notion of topological space by dropping the requirements that the set of open sets be closed under union and finite intersection, that the open sets be extensional, and that the membership predicate (of points in open sets ...

s which have found various applications in computer science. His monograph ''*-autonomous categories'', and his books ''Toposes, Triples, and Theories'', also coauthored with Wells, and ''Acyclic Models'', are aimed at more specialized audiences. He is on the editorial boards of ''Mathematical Structures in Computer Science'' and the electronic journal '' Homology, Homotopy and Applications'', and is editor of the electronic journal ''Theory and Applications of Categories''.

References

External links

''Toposes, Triples and Theories''
updated edition of text published in 1983.
''Category Theory for Computing Science''
updated edition of text published in 1999. * http://www.tac.mta.ca/tac (Theory and Applications of Categories) * https://web.archive.org/web/20080704125156/http://www.math.rutgers.edu/hha/geninfo.html (Homology, Homotopy and Applications) * 1937 births Living people Mathematicians from Philadelphia Central High School (Philadelphia) alumni University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences alumni Academic staff of McGill University Canadian mathematicians Canadian computer scientists Anglophone Quebec people Category theorists {{Canada-compu-bio-stub