The Lwów school of mathematics (Polish: Lwowska szkoła matematyczna) was a group of Polish mathematicians who worked in the interwar period in Lwów, Poland (since 1945 Lviv, Ukraine). The mathematicians often met at the famous Scottish Café to discuss mathematical problems, and published in the journal Studia Mathematica, founded in 1929. The school was renowned for its productivity and its extensive contributions to subjects such as point-set topology, set theory and functional analysis.
Members
Notable members of the Lwów school of mathematics included:
- Stefan Banach
- Feliks Barański
- Władysław Orlicz
- Stanisław Saks
- Hugo Steinhaus
- Stanisław Mazur
- Stanisław Ulam
- Józef Schreier
- Juliusz Schauder
- Mark Kac
- Antoni Łomnicki
- Stefan Kaczmarz
- Herman Auerbach
- Włodzimierz Stożek
- Stanisław Ruziewicz
- Eustachy Żyliński
The biographies and contributions of these mathematicians were documented in 1980 by their contemporary, Kazimierz Kuratowski in his book A Half Century of Polish Mathematics: Remembrances and Reflections.
The end of the school
Many of the mathematicians, especially those of Jewish background, fled this southeastern part of Poland in 1941 when it became clear that it would be invaded by Germany. Few of the mathematicians survived World War II, but after the war a group including some of the original community carried on their work in western Poland's Wrocław, the successor city to prewar Lwów; see Polish population transfers (1944–1946). A number of the prewar mathematicians, prominent among them Stanisław Ulam, became famous for work done in the United States.
See also
- Kraków School of Mathematics
- Lwów–Warsaw school
- Polish School of Mathematics
- Scottish Café
- Warsaw School of Mathematics
References
Further reading
- Pietsch, Albrecht (2007). History of Banach Spaces and Linear Operators. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Boston. ISBN 978-0-8176-4367-6. Retrieved 2022-09-02.
- Megginson, Robert E. (1998). An Introduction to Banach Space Theory. Graduate Texts in Mathematics. Vol. 183. New York, NY: Springer New York. ISBN 978-1-4612-6835-2. Retrieved 2022-09-02.
- Ulam, S. M. (2020). Bednarek, A. R., Ulam, F. (eds.). Analogies Between Analogies: The Mathematical Reports of S. M. Ulam and his Los Alamos Collaborators. Los Alamos Series in Basic and Applied Sciences (1990th ed.). University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520322929. ISBN 978-0-520-30230-3.
- Ulam, Stanisław Marcin (1976). Adventures of a Mathematician, illustrated with photographs. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-15064-6.
Citations
- Mauldin, R. Daniel (2015). The Scottish Book: Mathematics from The Scottish Café, with Selected Problems from The New Scottish Book. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-22897-6. ISBN 978-3-319-22896-9.
- Kuratowski, Kazimierz; Kirkor, Andrzej; Kuratowski, Kazimierz (1980). A half century of polish mathematics: remembrances and reflections. International series of monographs on pure and applied mathematics. Oxford Frankfurt: Pergamon Pr. ISBN 978-0-08-023046-7.
