Peter Henry George Aczel (31 October 1941 – 1 August 2023) was a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory, constructive set theory, and Frege structures.

Education

Aczel completed his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 1963 followed by a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1966 under the supervision of John Crossley.

Career and research

After two years of visiting positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Rutgers University, Aczel took a position at the University of Manchester. He has also held visiting positions at the University of Oslo, California Institute of Technology, Utrecht University, Stanford University, and Indiana University Bloomington. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2012. Aczel was on the editorial board of the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic and the Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, having previously served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Symbolic Logic and the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. He died on 1 August 2023.