Barry Mitchell

Barry Mitchell

[Niefield, Susan]

With great sadness, I learned today that my dissertation advisor Barry
Mitchell passed away in late January in a nursing home in Kingston, New
York. As part of the group at Columbia University in the sixties, Barry was
involved in the development of category theory and wrote one of the
earliest books on the subject. He was active through the seventies and
early eighties writing papers on abelian categories and homological
algebra. He was a great supervisor and mentor, and will be remembered for
his insightful and interesting approach to mathematics.

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Re: Barry Mitchell

[Steve Vickers]

I never met Barry, but one of his papers, “Rings with several objects”, was a great inspiration to me in my PhD study in the late 70s on  non-commutative rings. I was looking at some questions on partitioned matrices and knew enough category theory to spot the ringoids there (Abelian enriched categories), and even to understand that modules generalized to them. It was therefore a great pleasure to discover Barry’s paper.

In his treatment there, categories were not so much universes of discourse as mathematical structures in their own right, like rings. That seemed an unusual point of view in categorical writings, and it is one that has stayed with me. Even now I find it hard to get my head round presheaves or enriched categories without thinking of them as generalized rings and modules.

Steve Vickers.

> On 23 Mar 2021, at 16:27, Niefield, Susan <niefiels@union.edu> wrote:
> 
> With great sadness, I learned today that my dissertation advisor Barry
> Mitchell passed away in late January in a nursing home in Kingston, New
> York. As part of the group at Columbia University in the sixties, Barry was
> involved in the development of category theory and wrote one of the
> earliest books on the subject. He was active through the seventies and
> early eighties writing papers on abelian categories and homological
> algebra. He was a great supervisor and mentor, and will be remembered for
> his insightful and interesting approach to mathematics.
> 
> [Note from moderator: There is an obituary at:
> 
> https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyfreeman/obituary.aspx?n=barry-m-mitchell&pid=197672237&fhid=3910
> 
> ]


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