Andrzej Ehrenfeucht (, born 8 August 1932) is a
Polish-American mathematician and
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...
.
Life
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht formulated the
Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game, using the
back-and-forth method In mathematical logic, especially set theory and model theory, the back-and-forth method is a method for showing isomorphism between countably infinite structures satisfying specified conditions. In particular it can be used to prove that
* any two ...
given in
Roland Fraïssé
Roland Fraïssé (; 12 March 1920 – 30 March 2008) was a French mathematical logician.
Fraïssé received his doctoral degree from the University of Paris in 1953. In his thesis, Fraïssé used the back-and-forth method to determine whether ...
's PhD thesis. Also named for Ehrenfeucht is the
Ehrenfeucht–Mycielski sequence.
In 1971 Ehrenfeucht was a founding member of the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Colorado at Boulder. He currently teaches and does research at the University, where he runs a project, "breaking away", with Patricia Baggett; the project, using hands-on activities, aims at raising high-school students' interest in mathematics and technology.
Two of Ehrenfeucht's students,
Eugene Myers
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.
Education
Myers receiv ...
and
David Haussler
David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that d ...
, contributed to the sequencing of the
human genome. They, with Harold Gabow, Ross McConnell, and
Grzegorz Rozenberg, spoke at a 2012 University of Colorado two-day symposium honoring Ehrenfeucht's 80th birthday.
Two journal issues have come out in his honor, one at his 65th birthday in
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
''Lecture Notes in Computer Science'' is a series of computer science books published by Springer Science+Business Media since 1973.
Overview
The series contains proceedings, post-proceedings, monographs, and Festschrifts. In addition, tutorials, ...
, and one at his 80th in
Theoretical Computer Science
computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory.
It is difficult to circumscribe the ...
.
Private life
Ehrenfeucht married
Alfred Tarski
Alfred Tarski (, born Alfred Teitelbaum;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews ''School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews''. January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was a Polish-American logician a ...
's daughter Ina Tarski.
[ Anita B. Feferman and Solomon Feferman, ''Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic'', Cambridge University Press, 2004. , pp. 239–242.]
Bibliography
Books
* Andrzej Ehrenfeucht, Tero Harju, Ion Petre, David M. Prescott, Grzegorz Rozenberg, ''Computation in Living Cells: Gene Assembly in Ciliates'', Springer, 2004,
* Patricia Baggett, Andrzej Ehrenfeucht, ''Breaking Away from the Math Book: Creative Projects for Grades K-6'',
* Andrzej Ehrenfeucht, Tero Harju, Grzegorz Rozenberg, ''The Theory of 2-Structures: A Framework for Decomposition and Transformation of Graphs'', World Scientific, 1999,
Papers
(accessible throug
Wirtualna Biblioteka Nauki
*
Chen Chung Chang
Chen Chung Chang (Chinese: 张晨钟) was a mathematician who worked in model theory. He obtained his PhD from Berkeley in 1955 on "Cardinal and Ordinal Factorization of Relation Types" under Alfred Tarski. He wrote the standard text on model t ...
, Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
"A Characterization of Abelian Groups" ''
Fundamenta Mathematicae'', vol. 51, no. 2, 1962, pp. 141-147.
* Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
"An Application of Games to the Completeness Problem for Formalized Theories" ''
Fundamenta Mathematicae'', vol. 49, no. 2, 1960, pp. 129-141.
* Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
"On Theories Categorical in Power" ''
Fundamenta Mathematicae'', vol. 44, no. 2, 1957, pp. 241-248.
* Andrzej Ehrenfeucht,
Andrzej Mostowski
Andrzej Mostowski (1 November 1913 – 22 August 1975) was a Polish mathematician. He is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma.
Biography
Born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, Mostowski entered University of Warsaw in 1931. He was ...
"Models of Axiomatic Theories Admitting Automorphisms" ''
Fundamenta Mathematicae'', 1956, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 50-68.
See also
*
List of Poles – Mathematics
References
External links
Ehrenfeucht's websiteat the University of Colorado
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ehrenfeucht, Andrzej
1932 births
Living people
Scientists from Vilnius
People from Wilno Voivodeship (1926–1939)
20th-century American mathematicians
American computer scientists
Polish emigrants to the United States
Polish computer scientists
University of Warsaw alumni
University of Colorado faculty