Logic List Mailing Archive

Joachim Lambek (1922-2014)

[From the Studia Logica mailing list:]

We sadly inform that Professor Joachim Lambek (Jim for friends) passed 
away on June 23, 2014, at 2:00 p.m. in Montreal.

Joachim Lambek was born in Leipzig on December 5, 1922. His parents moved 
to Leipzig from a small town near Krakow (Poland). In the late 1930-ties 
the family left Germany for England. After the outbreak of the SWW, he 
spend two years in an internment camp in Canada, then entered McGill 
University in Montreal. He earned Ms.C. in mathematics in 1946. This 
university has remained his affiliation throughout his academic career; in 
the years 1963-1993 he was a professor at the Department of Mathematics 
and Statistics and occupied the Peter Redpath Chair, then a professor 
emeritus at McGill. He has visited many universities and research centers 
in Europe and America.

J. Lambek's scientific interests focused on algebra, category theory, 
mathematical logic, mathematical linguistics and number theory. In 
category theory he developed categorical logic, e.g. he has shown close 
connections between cartesian closed categories and typed lambda calculi. 
In mathematical linguistics, Lambek's Syntactic Calculus, introduced in 
1958 (nowadays called Lambek Calculus), is a basic logic for modern type 
grammars. This calculus and its different variants are extensively studied 
also in algebraic logic as the basic substrutural logics. In the last 
decades J. Lambek developed an algebraic approach to grammar, involving 
pregroups. He also studied some algebras of physics (quaternions) and 
published books on the history of mathematics.

The connections of J. Lambek with the Polish logical community were quite 
close. Syntactic Calculus was presented as an extension of the type 
reduction system of Ajdukiewicz (1935). J. Lambek often referred to works 
of the greatest Polish logicians (A.Tarski, A. Mostowski, H. Rasiowa, A. 
Grzegorczyk). His ideas in formal grammar were further elaborated by 
several Polish mathematicians of younger generation, mainly in Poznan and 
Olsztyn.

Joachim Lambek was a member of the Editorial Board of Studia Logica. Two 
special issues of Studia Logica (71.3, 2002 and 87.2-3, 2007) were 
dedicated to him on the occasion of his 80th and 85th birthday. J. Lambek 
was an invited speaker on Trends in Logic II, Warsaw, 2003.

Studia Logica editors