Re: Professor André Joyal to Receive 2022 CMS Jeffery-Williams PrizeThread-Topic: categories: Professor André Joyal to Receive 2022 CMS Jeffery-Williams Prize

[Steve Vickers <s.j.vickers@cs.bham.ac.uk>]


Dear Andre,

You do deserve it.

Speaking for myself, your monograph with Tierney was a huge influence on my own work: not only for its technical treatment, but also for the vigour with which it asserted the right of point-free spaces to the term “space”, unadorned, unqualified, with the implication that point-set spaces have been superseded as the subject of topology. It made me understand that my own book was hopelessly inadequate as an account of what point-free topology was for.

At the time its insistence on working with the internal logic of elementary toposes stood out among point-free writings; yet it showed how to make the calculations topologically natural. In particular, by showing that internal lattices of opens are equivalent externally to bundles, it gave a natural way to think about constructive locale theory. Even today, that point is not widely enough understood.

The monograph was a long time ago, and who am I to say how much was Joyal and how much Tierney? But in your work since I’ve always had the sense  that the point-free topology was topology and not lattice theory. That broadens out much further in the recent topos-locos writings with Anel.

And I haven’t even mentioned arithmetic universes!

So, from my own perspective, you richly deserve the recognition of the Jeffery-Williams prize.

Best wishes,

Steve (Vickers)

> On 25 Feb 2022, at 02:31, joyal.andre@uqam.ca wrote:
> Dear Steve,
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> I am not sure I deserve it more than so many others.
> I guess I am lucky.
> Unfortunately, there is no money attached!
> Anyway, I am please for the recognition.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> André
> 
> 

[For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]