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Jan Mycielski (Polish: ; born February 7, 1932) is a Polish-American mathematician, logician and philosopher, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is known for contributions to graph theory, combinatorics, set theory, topology and the philosophy of mathematics.

Life and career

He was born in 1932 in Wiśniowa, Podkarpackie Voivodeship, Poland.

Mycielski received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wrocław in 1957 under the supervision of Stanisław Hartman [pl]. His dissertation was entitled "Applications of Free Groups to Geometrical Constructions". Following positions at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of California, Berkeley, and Case Western Reserve University, he took a permanent faculty position at Colorado in 1969.

Contributions

Among the mathematical concepts named after Mycielski are:

• The Ehrenfeucht–Mycielski sequence, a sequence of binary digits with pseudorandom properties
• The Mycielskian, a construction for embedding any undirected graph into a larger graph with strictly higher chromatic number without creating any additional triangles.
• The Mycielski–Grötzsch graph, the Mycielskian of the 5-cycle, an 11-vertex triangle-free graph that is the smallest possible triangle-free graph requiring four colors.
• Mycielski's theorem that there exist triangle-free graphs with arbitrarily large chromatic number.

Awards and honors

In 1965, he received the Stefan Banach Prize of the Polish Mathematical Society.

In 1990, he was awarded the Wacław Sierpiński Medal and Lecture by the Polish Mathematical Society.

In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Selected works

• 1991. A Note on S. M. Ulam's Mathematics.

A note in Adventures of a Mathematician. Stanislaw Ulam. University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 0520071549

See also

• List of Polish mathematicians

References

1. ^ Curriculum vitae from Mycielski's web site, retrieved 2010-03-10.
2. Departmental web page for Mycielski Archived 2010-06-03 at the Wayback Machine at the Univ. of Colorado.
3. Jan Mycielski at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. "Medal i Wykład im. Wacława Sierpińskiego". ptm.org.pl (in Polish). Retrieved 22 November 2023.
5. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-02-10.

External links

• Mycielski's personal web page at the Univ. of Colorado.

• 1932 births
• Living people
• Polish set theorists
• Polish logicians
• University of Colorado Boulder faculty
• Polish emigrants to the United States
• University of Wrocław alumni
• 20th-century American mathematicians
• 21st-century American mathematicians
• Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
• Mycielski family
• 20th-century Polish philosophers