Jim Lambek

[Bob Coecke <bob.coecke@cs.ox.ac.uk>]

It was my great luck to have known Jim Lambek quite well for the past 15 years.  

Of course, Jim was the first one to identify categorical structures in the `real world', in the form of the structure of grammar with his 1956 paper, and as already mentioned by Andre, he pioneered many branches of category theory, such as categorical logic and coalgebra.  

But even more so, Jim Lambek was also lots of fun!  He didn't take himself over-seriously, loved to have a laugh at the pub, and was always in for a genuinely funny  joke during talks.  When he first heard about dagger categories in a talk (which are monoidal categories with an involution, something which he himself considered way before), he asked how one was able to take these on a plane. He prides himself in that his greatest scientific contribution was the introduction of the symbol R for a ring, replacing the impossible to draw gothic symbols.  

Unlike some in category theory land, he had a genuine interest in other sciences and actively contributed to them.  One of the most striking things is probably that in mathematical/computational linguistics his pioneering contributions span well over 50 years, with the release of his book on pregroup grammars in 2007, which have now meanwhile found there way into mainstream natural language processing.  The past few years he was working on physics related topics and he had asked me to take care of his papers getting publicised in the event of what just happened.

While the passing of a friend is of course extremely sad, Jim was a very happy person and has enjoyed an extremely exciting and colourful life, and oh boy it was fun having had a small part in that!



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