Roland Fraïssé

Roland Fraïssé (March 12, 1920 – March 30, 2008^[1]) (French pronunciation: [ʁɔˈlɑ̃ fʁajˈse]) was a French mathematical logician. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Paris in 1953. In his thesis,^[2]^[3] Fraïssé used the back-and-forth method to determine whether two model-theoretic structures were elementarily equivalent. This method of determining elementary equivalence was later formulated as the Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game. Fraïssé worked primarily in relation theory. Another of his important works was the Fraïssé construction of a Fraïssé limit of finite structures. He also introduced the notion of compensor in the theory of posets.^[4]

Most of his career was spent as Professor at the University of Provence in Marseille, France.

Selected publications

Sur quelques classifications des systèmes de relations, thesis, University of Paris, 1953; published in Publications Scientifiques de l'Université d'Alger, series A 1 (1954), 35–182.
Cours de logique mathématique, Paris: Gauthier-Villars Éditeur, 1967; second edition, 3 vols., 1971–1975; tr. into English and ed. by David Louvish as Course of Mathematical Logic, 2 vols., Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973–1974.
Theory of relations, tr. into English by P. Clote, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986; rev. ed. 2000.

^ Rogics08 - Décès de Roland Fraïssé - Message de Maurice Pouzet et Gérard Lopez, accessed May 22, 2008.
^ Sur une nouvelle classification des systèmes de relations, Roland Fraïssé, Comptes Rendus 230 (1950), 1022–1024.
^ Sur quelques classifications des systèmes de relations, Roland Fraïssé, thesis, Paris, 1953; published in Publications Scientifiques de l'Université d'Alger, series A 1 (1954), 35–182.
^ Petits posets : dénombrement, représentabilité par cercles et compenseurs, Roland Fraïssé and Nik Lygeros C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Sér. I Math. 313 (1991), no. 7, 417--420