Michael Makkai is a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

, specializing in mathematical logic

Mathematical logic

Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...

. He works in model theory

Model theory

In mathematics, model theory is the study of mathematical structures using tools from mathematical logic....

, category theory

Category theory

Category theory is an area of study in mathematics that examines in an abstract way the properties of particular mathematical concepts, by formalising them as collections of objects and arrows , where these collections satisfy certain basic conditions...

, algebraic logic

Algebraic logic

In mathematical logic, algebraic logic is the study of logic presented in an algebraic style.What is now usually called classical algebraic logic focuses on the identification and algebraic description of models appropriate for the study of various logics and connected problems...

, and in the theory of topoi

Topos

In mathematics, a topos is a type of category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space...

. He graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, then worked at the Mathematical Institute

Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics

The Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics is the research institute in mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was created in 1950 by Alfréd Rényi, who directed it until his death. Since its creation, the institute has been the center of mathematical research in Hungary. It received...

 of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences is the most important and prestigious learned society of Hungary. Its seat is at the bank of the Danube in Budapest.-History:...

. He learned logic from Rózsa Péter

Rózsa Péter

Rózsa Péter , Hungarian name Péter Rózsa, was a Hungarian mathematician. She is best known for her work with recursion theory....

 and Andrzej Mostowski

Andrzej Mostowski

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

.Between 1974 and 2010, he was professor of mathematics at the McGill University

McGill University

Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

. He retired in 2010. He is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences is the most important and prestigious learned society of Hungary. Its seat is at the bank of the Danube in Budapest.-History:...

 (1995).

With Leo Harrington

Leo Harrington

Leo Anthony Harrington is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who works inrecursion theory, model theory, and set theory.* Harrington and Jeff Paris proved the Paris–Harrington theorem....

 and Saharon Shelah

Saharon Shelah

Saharon Shelah is an Israeli mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University in New Jersey.-Biography:...

 he proved the Vaught conjecture

Vaught conjecture

The Vaught conjecture is a conjecture in the mathematical field of model theory originally proposed by Robert Lawson Vaught in 1961. It states that the number of countable models of a first-order complete theory in a countable language is finite or ℵ0 or 2ℵ0...

 for ω-stable theories.

Makkai has an Erdős number

Erdos number

The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.The same principle has been proposed for other eminent persons in other fields.- Overview :...

 of 1, having coauthored "Some remarks on set theory. X." with Paul Erdős

Paul Erdos

Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory...

in 1966.

Selected publications

• M. Makkai, G. E. Reyes: First Order Categorical Logic, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 611, Springer, 1977.
• L. Harrington, M. Makkai, S. Shelah: A proof of Vaught's conjecture for ω-stable theories, Israel J. Math., 49(1984), 259–280.
• Michael Makkai, Robert Paré: Accessible categories: the foundations of categorical model theory. Contemporary Mathematics, 104. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1989. viii+176 pp. ISBN 0-8218-5111-X
• M. Makkai: Duality and Definability in First Order Logic, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 503, 1993, ISSN 0065-9266

External links

• Makkai's homepage at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences