Stevo Todorčević

Stevo Todorčević FRSC (Serbian Cyrillic: Стево Тодорчевић; born February 9, 1955), is a Yugoslavian mathematician specializing in mathematical logic and set theory. He holds a Canada Research Chair in mathematics at the University of Toronto,^[1][2] and a director of research position at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris.

Stevo Todorčević
Todorčević in 1984
Born	February 9, 1955 (1955-02-09) (age 70) Ubovića Brdo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Alma mater	University of Belgrade
Awards	Balkan Mathematical Society First Prize 1980, 1982 CRM-Fields-PIMS 2012 Shoenfield 2013 Gödel Lecturers 2016
Scientific career
Fields	mathematical logic set theory Banach space theory topological dynamics set-theoretic topology
Institutions	University of Toronto CNRS
Thesis	Results and Independence Proofs in Combinatorial Set Theory  (1979)
Doctoral advisor	Đuro Kurepa
Doctoral students	Ilijas Farah Justin T. Moore

Early life and education

Todorčević was born in Ubovića Brdo. As a child he moved to Banatsko Novo Selo,^[3] and went to school in Pančevo.^[4] At Belgrade University, he studied pure mathematics, attending lectures by Đuro Kurepa. He began graduate studies in 1978, and wrote his doctoral thesis in 1979 with Kurepa as his advisor.^[5]

Research

Todorčević's work involves mathematical logic, set theory, and their applications to pure mathematics.

In Todorčević's 1978 master’s thesis, he constructed a model of MA + ¬wKH in a way to allow him to make the continuum any regular cardinal, and so derived a variety of topological consequences. Here MA is an abbreviation for Martin's axiom and wKH stands for the weak Kurepa Hypothesis.^[6] In 1980, Todorčević and Abraham proved the existence of rigid Aronszajn trees and the consistency of MA + the negation of the continuum hypothesis + there exists a first countable S-space.^[7]

Awards and honours

Todorčević is the winner of

• the first prize of the Balkan Mathematical Society for 1980 and 1982,^[8]
• the 2012 CRM-Fields-PIMS prize in mathematical sciences,^[9] and
• the Shoenfield prize of the Association for Symbolic Logic for "outstanding expository writing in the field of logic" in 2013, for his book Introduction to Ramsey Spaces.^[10][IRS]

He was selected by the Association for Symbolic Logic as their 2016 Gödel Lecturer.^[11]

He became a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts as of 1991 and a full member of the Academy in 2009.^[12] In 2016 Todorčević became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.^[13]

Todorčević has been described as "the greatest Serbian mathematician" since the time of Mihailo Petrović Alas.^[14]

Books

Todorčević is the author of several books in mathematics, including:

• Partition Problems in Topology. Providence, R.I: American Mathematical Soc. 1989. ISBN 978-0-8218-5091-6. MR 0980949.
• (with Ilijas Farah) Some Applications of the Method of Forcing. Moscow: Yenisei. 1995. ISBN 978-5-88623-014-7. MR 1486583.
• Topics in Topology. Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Berlin ; New York: Springer. 1997. ISBN 978-3-540-62611-4. MR 1442262.
• (with Spiros A. Argyros) Ramsey Methods in Analysis. Basel ; Boston: Springer Science & Business Media. 2005. ISBN 978-3-7643-7264-4. MR 2145246.
• Walks on Ordinals and Their Characteristics. Basel: Birkhäuser. 2007. ISBN 978-3-7643-8528-6. MR 2355670. OCLC 166357947.
• Introduction to Ramsey Spaces. Annals of Mathematics Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-691-14542-6. MR 2603812. OCLC 437054050.
• Notes on Forcing Axioms. New Jersey: World Scientific Publishing Company. 2014. ISBN 978-981-4571-57-9. MR 3184691.

See also

• Baumgartner's axiom
• Kechris–Pestov–Todorčević correspondence
• Open coloring axiom
• S and L spaces