Jan Mycielski

Jan Mycielski (born February 7, 1932 in Wisniowa, Poland) is a Polish-American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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". 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.

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 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.

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

See also

• List of Poles

External links

• Mycielski's personal web page at the Univ. of Colorado.