Lambek was born in
Leipzig,
Germany, where he attended a
Gymnasium.[3] He came to England in 1938 as a
refugee on the Kindertransport.[2] From there he was interned as an
enemy alien and deported to a
prison work camp in
New Brunswick,
Canada. There, he began in his spare time a mathematical apprenticeship with Fritz Rothberger, also
interned, and wrote the
McGill Junior Matriculation in fall of 1941.[3] In the spring of 1942, he was released and settled in
Montreal, where he entered studies at McGill University, graduating with an
honours mathematics degree in 1945 and an
MSc a year later.[4] In 1950, he completed his doctorate under
Hans Zassenhaus becoming McGill's first
PhD in mathematics.
Lambek retired in 1992 but continued his involvement at
McGill's mathematics department. In 2000 a
festschrift celebrating Lambek's contributions to mathematical structures in
computer science was published.[6] On the occasion of Lambek's 90th birthday, a collection Categories and Types in Logic, Language, and Physics was produced in tribute to him.[7]
— (1966). Completions of categories. Seminar lectures given in 1966 in Zürich. Lecture Notes in Mathematics, No. 24. Berlin, New York:
Springer-Verlag.
MR0209330.
— (1971). Torsion theories, additive semantics, and rings of quotients. Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Vol. 177. Berlin, New York:
Springer-Verlag.
MR0284459.
— (2008). From word to sentence: a computational algebraic approach to grammar. Polimetrica.
ISBN978-88-7699-117-2.
Articles
Lambek, Joachim (1951), "The immersibility of a semigroup into a group", Canadian Journal of Mathematics, 3: 34–43,
doi:10.4153/CJM-1951-005-8,
S2CID124979541
— (1969). "Deductive systems and categories II. Standard constructions and closed categories". Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Vol. 86. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 76–122.
doi:
10.1007/bfb0079385.
ISBN978-3-540-04605-9.
ISSN0075-8434.
^Casadio, Claudia; Coeke, Bob; Moortgat, Michael; Scott, Philip, eds. (2014), Categories and Types in Logic, Language, and Physics: Essays Dedicated to Jim Lambek on the Occasion of His 90th Birthday, Springer-Verlag