Joachim Lambek

Joachim Lambek (1922 to 2014) was a Canadian mathematician and Peter Redpath Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at McGill University, where in 1950 he earned the first doctorate in mathematics that McGill awarded, under Hans Zassenhaus. Born in Leipzig, he came to England as a refugee on the Kindertransport and was later interned and deported to a prison work camp in New Brunswick, where he began his mathematical apprenticeship. His early work concerned module theory, torsion theories, non-commutative localization and injective modules, and in a 1954 paper with Moser he proved the Lambek-Moser theorem about integer sequences. After a sabbatical year at ETH Zurich in 1965 and 1966 he turned to category theory, developing the connections between typed lambda calculus and cartesian closed categories, and he later worked on pregroup grammar and the Lambek calculus, an influential logical account of natural language syntax.