Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 11, 2026

Peter Aczel

Peter Henry George Aczel was a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory, constructive set theory, and Frege structures.

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Peter Aczel
Aczel in 2006
Born
Peter Henry George Aczel

(1941-10-31)31 October 1941
Died1 August 2023(2023-08-01) (aged 81)
Alma materUniversity of Oxford
Known forAczel's anti-foundation axiom
Reflexive sets
Constructive set theory (CZF)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematical logic
Institutions
Thesis Mathematical Problems in Logic  (1967)
John Newsome Crossley
Websitewww.cs.man.ac.uk/~petera/

Peter Henry George Aczel (/ˈæksəl/; 31 October 1941 – 1 August 2023) was a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester.1 He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory,2 constructive set theory,34 and Frege structures.56

Education

Aczel completed his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 19637 followed by a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1966 under the supervision of John Crossley.18

Career and research

After two years of visiting positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Rutgers University, Aczel took a position at the University of Manchester. He has also held visiting positions at the University of Oslo, California Institute of Technology, Utrecht University, Stanford University, and Indiana University Bloomington.7 In the Spring of 2009, Aczel was a Residential Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden.9 He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2012.10

Aczel was on the editorial board of the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic11 and the Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, having previously served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Symbolic Logic and the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic.712

He died on 1 August 2023.13

References

References

  1. Peter Aczel at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. Moss, Lawrence S. (February 20, 2018). "Non-wellfounded Set Theory". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  3. Aczel, P. (1977). "An Introduction to Inductive Definitions". Handbook of Mathematical Logic. Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics. Vol. 90. pp. 739–201. doi:10.1016/S0049-237X(08)71120-0. ISBN 9780444863881.
  4. Aczel, P.; Mendler, N. (1989). "A final coalgebra theorem". Category Theory and Computer Science. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 389. p. 357. doi:10.1007/BFb0018361. ISBN 3-540-51662-X.
  5. Aczel, P. (1980). "Frege Structures and the Notions of Proposition, Truth and Set". The Kleene Symposium. Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics. Vol. 101. pp. 31–32. doi:10.1016/S0049-237X(08)71252-7. ISBN 9780444853455.
  6. Peter Aczel at DBLP Bibliography Server
  7. "Peter Aczel page the University of Manchester".
  8. Aczel, Peter (1966). Mathematical problems in logic (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford.(subscription required)
  9. "Former Fellows SCAS".
  10. "Scholars". Institute for Advanced Study. 14 August 2015.
  11. Dame, Marketing Communications: Web | University of Notre. "Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic". Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  12. "Annals of Pure and Applied Logic" – via www.journals.elsevier.com.
  13. "Fom - [FOM] Peter Aczel - arc".
External links

Media related to Peter Aczel at Wikimedia Commons