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Daniel Kan

Daniel Kan was a Dutch-Israeli mathematician who worked in homotopy theory and category theory and introduced adjoint functors.

1927 to 2013Introducing adjoint functorsThe Kan extensionKan complexes and Kan fibrationsSimplicial methods in homotopy theory

Born: 4 August 1927, Amsterdam
Died: 4 August 2013, Newton
Occupation: mathematician, topologist
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Amsterdam

Daniel Kan was born in 1927 in Amsterdam

Daniel Kan was born in Amsterdam in 1927 to a Jewish family. During World War II he and his family were held at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The family survived, but his parents died of dysentery soon after the camp was liberated, and he was left an orphan.

He earned his doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Samuel Eilenberg. His thesis dealt with abstract homotopy. During his military service in the 1950s he developed the idea of adjoint functors, which he published in 1958.

From 1959 he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he formally retired in 1993. His students included Aldridge Bousfield, William Dwyer and Emmanuel Dror Farjoun. In 1983 he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

His work on simplicial sets gave his name to Kan complexes, Kan fibrations and the Kan extension. Later he studied model categories, including work with Bousfield on homotopy limits and with Dwyer on simplicial localizations. He died in 2013.