Lawvere completed his Ph.D at Columbia in 1963 with Eilenberg. His dissertation introduced the Category of Categories as a framework for the semantics of algebraic theories. During 1964–1967 at the Forschungsinstitut für Mathematik at the ETH in Zürich he worked on the Category of Categories and was especially influenced by Pierre Gabriel's seminars at Oberwolfach on Grothendieck's foundation of algebraic geometry. He then taught at the University of Chicago, working with Mac Lane, and at the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY), working with Alex Heller. Lawvere's Chicago lectures on categorical dynamics were a further step toward topos theory and his CUNY lectures on hyperdoctrines advanced categorical logic especially using his 1963 discovery that existential and universal quantifiers can be characterized as special cases of adjoint functors.
