Logic List Mailing Archive

James Baumgartner (1943-2011)

I am sorry to share the sad news that Jim Baumgartener, one of the 
greatest modern set theorists, suddenly died of a heart attack. Jim is 
known for a large number of fascinating results in set theory, including 
the consistency of every two aleph_1 dense sets of reals being order 
isomorphic, his method of forcing a club to omega_1 using finite 
conditions, and many results in ordinal partition relations including the 
celebrated Baumgartner-Hajnal theorem that omega_1 arrows (alpha)^2_n for 
every countable alpha and finite n. To this day, almost every result in 
combinatorial set theory is in some way connected with Jim and his 
interests.

Jim was born in 1943 and obtained his PhD in 1970 at Berkeley with Robert 
Vaught. He spent his entire career at Dartmouth College. Jim was a 
fantastic person, colleague and advisor. Among his Ph.D. students were 
Jean Larson, Alan Taylor and Stan Wagon and among his postdocs Uri 
Abraham, Alessandro Andretta and James Cummings. All who had an occasion 
to know Jim were struck by his warm personality and modesty in the face of 
mathematics. In spite of his great talent and achievement he never put his 
own work in front of that of the others and has generously helped all who 
came across him as students and colleagues. Rest in peace Jim, you are no 
longer with us, but your achievements will remain so forever.