Marta Bunge

Marta Bunge is currently Emeritus Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1938, she studied both philosophy and mathematics as an undergraduate in her home town. In 1960, she began her graduate studies in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania where in 1966 she obtained a doctorate with work on category theory supervised by Peter J. Freyd and F.W. Lawvere. She and her husband Mario Bunge, a philosopher of science, moved that same year to Montreal where they became professors at McGill University and raised their two children Eric and Silvia, now respectively an architect based in New York and a cognitive neuroscientist at UC Berkeley. At McGill University she taught a variety of graduate courses and seminars based on her own research and formed eleven graduate students in a variety of topics. Her mathematical work during the past fifty years has centered on category theory and topos theory with applications to several branches of classical mathematics. She has spent sabbatical years in Aarhus Universitet, E.T.H. Zurich, Universite de Geneve, UNAM Mexico, Universita di Genova, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of two research books, Singular Coverings of Toposes (with her former student Jonathon Funk), Springer LNM 1890, 2006, and Synthetic Differential Topology (with her former student Felipe Gago and his former student Ana San Luis), Cambridge University Press, to appear (2018). She is in the editorial board of two mathematical journals, Cahiers de Topologie et Geometrie Differentielle Categoriques (Amiens, France), and Tbilisi Mathematical Journal (Tbilisi, Georgia). In addition to mathematics, she is passionate about classical music, literature, cinema, history, world affairs, and travel.