Andrzej Mostowski

Andrzej Mostowski (1 November 1913 – 22 August 1975) was a Polish mathematician who made significant contributions to logic and the foundations of mathematics. Born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, he studied at the University of Warsaw, where he was influenced by Kazimierz Kuratowski, Adolf Lindenbaum, and Alfred Tarski. He earned his Ph.D. in 1939 under the supervision of Kuratowski and Tarski. During World War II, he worked in the Underground Warsaw University and narrowly escaped a Nazi concentration camp. After the war, he returned to the University of Warsaw, where he remained until his death. Mostowski was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a prominent figure in the Warsaw School of Mathematics. His research primarily focused on recursion theory, undecidability, first-order logic, and model theory. He is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1954 and was elected a real member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1963. His son, Tadeusz Mostowski, also became a mathematician.