William Lawvere

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Francis William Lawvere is a mathematician known for his work in category theory, topos theory and the philosophy of mathematics.

Lawvere completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Columbia University in 1963, under the supervision of Samuel Eilenberg, a founder of category theory. He first taught at the University of Chicago, where he was a colleague of the other founder of category theory, Saunders Mac Lane. Lawvere then spent most of his career at University at Buffalo, where he is professor emeritus of mathematics and an adjunct professor emeritus of philosophy.

Lawvere was originally a student of Clifford Truesdell working in the subject of continuum mechanics. Truesdell sent him on to Eilenberg upon concluding that he was "really more of a mathematician than [a] physicist"; Truesdell having been a colleague of Eilenberg during World War II. Lawvere would eventually return to continuum mechanics through the application of category theory ('Categorical Dynamics'), inspiring ongoing work in the field of synthetic differential geometry.

Lawvere, together with Myles Tierney, developed the definition of an elementary topos, generalizing the concept of the Grothendieck topos, in 1969-70 (see background and genesis of topos theory).

[edit] Selected books

1997 Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories (with Stephen H. Schanuel). Cambridge Uni. Press. ISBN 0-521-47817-0
2003 (2002) Sets for Mathematics (with Robert Rosebrugh). Cambridge Uni. Press. ISBN 0-521-01060-8