Michael Barr is Peter Redpath Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at McGill University.[1] Although his earlier work was in homological algebra, his principal research area for a number of years has been category theory. He is well known to theoretical computer scientists for his book Category Theory for Computing Science with Charles Wells, as well as for the development of *-autonomous categories and Chu spaces which have found various applications in computer science. His monograph *-autonomous categories, and his books Triples, Toposes, and Theories, also coauthored with Wells, and Acyclic Models, are aimed at more specialized audiences.
He is on the editorial boards of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science and the electronic journal Homology, Homotopy and Applications, and is editor of the electronic journal Theory and Applications of Categories.
He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 22, 1937. He graduated from the 202nd class of Central High School in June 1954, from the University of Pennsylvania in February 1959 and received a PhD from the same school in June 1962. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of Illinois before coming to McGill in 1968.