News and Events: Miscellaneous

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Marcin Mostowski 1955-2017

Professor Marcin Mostowski has passed away last Saturday, October 28th, 2017. He was an extremely inspiring teacher, great friend, charismatic logician and philosopher. He has been consistently teaching that understanding logic is a fundament of liberal arts education.

For many years Marcin Mostowski was a philosophy professor at the Warsaw University. He re-created the Warsaw Logic School in the 1990s bringing together philosophers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. His dedication to teaching and research has tremendously influenced a few generations of polish logicians. Every year he organized the Summer Logic Workshop and led the unforgettable seminars on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. For many students, particularly philosophy undergraduates, these seminars were the first contact with research in mathematical logic. He created an atmosphere of friendship, passion and focus; spending countless hours discussing with students not only in seminar rooms but also in various parks and cafes around Warsaw. Recently, he moved to Jagiellonian University in Kraków to take the chair of logic at the philosophy department. Sadly, he did not have time to establish a new group there.

Marcin has authored a number of insightful papers in the theory of generalized quantifiers, finite model theory, philosophy of mathematics, and logical theory of natural language. In the 90s together with M. Krynicki and L.W. Szczerba he edited a two volume handbook of generalized quantifiers ‘Quantifiers: Logics, Models and Computations’. He initiated the study of natural language semantics with computational complexity tools. He has also proposed the theory of representability of arithmetical notions in finite models to investigate philosophical idea of representing infinite sets in finite but potentially infinite domains. He was also one of the first people in Warsaw to realize the mathematical potential in cognitive modeling. He started an interdisciplinary seminar on cognitive science that later grew in the cognitive science program at the Warsaw University.

The memorial service will take place Friday, November 3, at 14.30 in Żyrardów, Waryńskiego 7.

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