From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/10661 Path: news.gmane.io!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Thomas Streicher Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: big loss - Jean Benabou died last Friday Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2022 23:25:42 +0100 Message-ID: Reply-To: Thomas Streicher Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Injection-Info: ciao.gmane.io; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:116.202.254.214"; logging-data="36403"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" To: Original-X-From: majordomo@rr.mta.ca Mon Feb 14 03:07:14 2022 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane-mx.org Original-Received: from smtp2.mta.ca ([198.164.44.75]) by ciao.gmane.io with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1nJQll-0009F5-N4 for gsmc-categories@m.gmane-mx.org; Mon, 14 Feb 2022 03:07:13 +0100 Original-Received: from rr.mta.ca ([198.164.44.159]:44530) by smtp2.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from ) id 1nJQio-0000uf-Du; Sun, 13 Feb 2022 22:04:10 -0400 Original-Received: from majordomo by rr.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.92.1) (envelope-from ) id 1nJQib-0000EW-BR for categories-list@rr.mta.ca; Sun, 13 Feb 2022 22:03:57 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.io gmane.science.mathematics.categories:10661 Archived-At: 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 [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]