Andrzej Mostowski

Who was Andrzej Mostowski?

Andrzej Mostowski was a Polish mathematician. He is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma.

Born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, Mostowski entered University of Warsaw in 1931. He was influenced by Kuratowski, Lindenbaum and Tarski. His Ph.D. came in 1939, officially directed by Kuratowski but in practice directed by Tarski who was a young lecturer at that time.

He became an accountant after the German invasion of Poland but continued working in the Underground Warsaw University. After the Warsaw uprising of 1944 the Nazis tried to put him in a concentration camp. With the help of some Polish nurses he escaped to a hospital, choosing to take bread with him rather than his notebook containing his research. Some of this research he reconstructed after the War, however much of it remained lost.

This work was largely on recursion theory and undecidability. From 1946 until his death in Vancouver, Canada, he worked at the University of Warsaw. Much of work during that time was on first order logic and model theory.

His son Tadeusz is also a mathematician working on differential geometry.