Thomas J. Jech (, ; born 29 January 1944 in
Prague
Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...
) is a
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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
specializing in
set theory
Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies Set (mathematics), sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory – as a branch of mathema ...
who was at
Penn State for more than 25 years.
Life
He was educated at
Charles University
Charles University (CUNI; , UK; ; ), or historically as the University of Prague (), is the largest university in the Czech Republic. It is one of the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, oldest universities in the world in conti ...
(his advisor was
Petr Vopěnka) and from 2000 is at th
Institute of Mathematicsof the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
The Czech Academy of Sciences (abbr. CAS, , abbr. AV ČR) was established in 1992 by the Czech National Council as the Czech successor of the former Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and its tradition goes back to the Royal Bohemian Society of ...
.
Work
Jech's research also includes
mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is the study of Logic#Formal logic, formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory (also known as computability theory). Research in mathematical logic com ...
,
algebra
Algebra is a branch of mathematics that deals with abstract systems, known as algebraic structures, and the manipulation of expressions within those systems. It is a generalization of arithmetic that introduces variables and algebraic ope ...
,
analysis
Analysis (: analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...
,
topology
Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...
, and
measure theory
In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures (length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as magnitude (mathematics), magnitude, mass, and probability of events. These seemingl ...
.
Jech gave the first published proof of the consistency of the existence of a
Suslin line.
With
Karel Prikry, he introduced the notion of
precipitous ideal.
He gave several models where the
axiom of choice
In mathematics, the axiom of choice, abbreviated AC or AoC, is an axiom of set theory. Informally put, the axiom of choice says that given any collection of non-empty sets, it is possible to construct a new set by choosing one element from e ...
failed, for example one with ω
1 measurable. The concept of a
Jech–Kunen tree is named after him and
Kenneth Kunen
Herbert Kenneth Kunen (August 2, 1943August 14, 2020) was a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who worked in set theory and its applications to various areas of mathematics, such as set-theoretic topology and ...
.
Bibliography
*
* ''Lectures in set theory, with particular emphasis on the method of forcing'', Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Mathematics 217 (1971) ()
* ''The axiom of choice'', North-Holland 1973 (Dover paperback edition )
* (with
K. Hrbáček) ''Introduction to set theory'', Marcel Dekker, 3rd edition 1999 ()
* ''Multiple forcing'', Cambridge University Press 1986 ()
''Set Theory'': The Third Millennium Edition, revised and expanded 2006, Springer Science & Business Media, . 1st ed. 1978;
2nd (corrected) ed. 1997
References
External links
Home page, with a copy a
Penn state
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jech, Thomas
1944 births
Living people
20th-century Czech mathematicians
21st-century Czech mathematicians
Set theorists
Czechoslovak mathematicians
Charles University alumni