big loss - Jean Benabou died last Friday

big loss - Jean Benabou died last Friday

[Thomas Streicher]

I have received today a mail from his son telling me that Jean B'enabou
died Friday morning (11.Feb.2022).
Some of you may have seen a mail on the French categories list from
today also reporting this very bad news.

I know that some of you know him since ever. As a person and because
of his work since the late 50s.
I vividly remember seeing him the first time when he gave a brief
lecture at the Logic Colloqium in Firenze in 1982. The topic was a
precursor of his 1985 JSL article. Not that I understood too much but
I felt immediately attracted. Not only by the topic but also by the
person and his compelling way to speak. Not much later I got hold of
J.-R. Roisin's handwritten notes of Jean's Louvain-la-Neuve lectures
"Des Cat'egories Fibr'ees" from 1980. Since that time the subject has
occupied a major part of my mind. It was Friday morning that I uploaded
the most recent version of my notes on "Fibered Categories `a la Jean
B'enabou" to the arxiv not knowing that he had just passed away...

Though he didn't write as much as some of us (me in particular) hoped
his work has been enormously influential. His standards of presentation
were so high that, alas, he never finished his book on Fibered Categories.
But he "spread the gospel" in numerous lectures around the world and
this way has influenced many people's thinking in particular about
the foundations of category theory.
Another of his main contributions were his "distributeurs" on which he
gave a course at my university in June 2000. The notes I prepared are
still available from my home page and have been referred to by many
people using this ubiquituous concept which, however, is much older
(late 60s if I am not mistaken).
Of course, there is much more and I just have mentioned the things
closest to my mind.

I am still most grateful for the many times we met and he patiently
reveiled to me the ideas behind and new insights into the above
mentioned concepts and many other things. His approach to mathematical
thinking avoiding unnecessary technicalities and instead reveiling the
intuition behind it always appeared to me as an inaccessibly ideal one!

I know he was not afraid of fighting for his ideas and not always
avoided a confrontation in this vein. But I remember him as a very
friendly and generous person with quite some sense of humour.

It is very sad that we can't experience all this anymore. But my
memories of him will still very vivid forever!

Thomas



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