Szabolcs Mikulas (1966-2023)

With deep sorrow we announce that Szabolcs Mikulás died on 27th June 2023. He was 56, and had been beset by cancer for the last three years.

Szabolcs will be very well known to many in the logic community. He took his first degree, in Mathematics and Philosophy, in 1990 at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His doctoral thesis "Taming Logics” (1995) was in Algebraic Logic under the joint supervision of Hajnal Andréka and Johan van Benthem, at ILLC Amsterdam. The thesis is available on request from r.hirsch at ucl.ac.uk (see also https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01066355 for related work). It has been hugely influential in subjects ranging from linguistics to algebras of relations, and continues to be the basis of current investigations into relational representability, which corresponds to (lack of) provability in the Lambek Calculus. Szabolcs had made a recent breakthrough, by proving the failure of the finite representation property for representable ordered residuated semigroups (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.11685.pdf). As recently as May, he was working with PhD students on closely related research.

Szabolcs worked at King’s College London from 1996, and then at Birkbeck College London from 2000 until 2022, as a Lecturer and (from 2011) Senior Lecturer. He published nearly fifty research papers, many with co-authors, on subjects including algebras of relations, temporal logic, relevance logic, and databases.

The last 20 years were the happiest of Szabolcs’s life. He was lucky enough to find a true soulmate, Nataša Perović, who cherished and loved him right through to the end.