Jan Mycielski

Jan Mycielski (born February 7, 1932 in Wiśniowa, Podkarpackie Voivodeship, Poland)[1] is a Polish-American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[2]

Academic career

Mycielski received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wrocław in 1957 under the supervision of Stanisław Hartman. His dissertation was entitled "Applications of Free Groups to Geometrical Constructions".[3] 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.[1]

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 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[4]

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
gollark: It would be like if I just wrote `x is not equal to infinity` instead of actually solving an equation.
gollark: While technically true, it's useless.
gollark: What if it turns you into a zombie, but only after exactly 6 months?
gollark: We don't know the exact numbers but have rough information from which other information can be extrapolated.
gollark: People still have *some* idea.

See also
  • List of Poles

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. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-02-10.
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