Joachim Lambek: The Interplay of Mathematics, Logic, and Linguistics

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

This book is dedicated to the life and work of the mathematician Joachim Lambek (1922-2014). The editors gather together noted experts to discuss the state of the art of various of Lambek’s works in logic, category theory, and linguistics and to celebrate his contributions to those areas over the course of his multifaceted career.

After early work in combinatorics and elementary number theory, Lambek became a distinguished algebraist (notably in ring theory). In the 1960s, he began to work in category theory, categorical algebra, logic, proof theory, and foundations of computability. In a parallel development, beginning in the late 1950s and for the rest of his career, Lambek also worked extensively in mathematical linguistics and computational approaches to natural languages. He and his collaborators perfected production and type grammars for numerous natural languages. Lambek grammars form an early noncommutative precursor to Girard’s linear logic. In a surprising development (2000), he introduced a novel and deeper algebraic framework (which he called pregroup grammars) for analyzing natural language, along with algebraic, higher category, and proof-theoretic semantics.

This book is of interest to mathematicians, logicians, linguists, and computer scientists.