Bruno Abakanowicz - Misplaced Pages

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Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz (October 6, 1852 - August 29 1900) was a Polish mathematician, inventor and electrical engineer.

He was born in 1852 in Wilkamerge, at the time a part of the Russian Empire. After graduating from the Riga Technical University (then Riga Polytechnicum), at the age of 23 Abakanowicz passed his habilitation and began an assistantship at the Technical University of Lwów. In 1881, he moved to France where he purchased a villa in Parc St. Maur on the outskirts of Paris.

There, among other things, he invented the integraph, a form of the integrator, which was patented in 1880, and was henceforth produced by the Swiss firm Coradi. Among his other patents were the parabolagraph, the spirograph, the electric bell used in trains, and an electric arc lamp of his own design. Abakanowicz published several works, including works on statistics, integrators and numerous popular scientific works, such as one describing his integraph. He was also hired by the French government as an expert on electrification and was the main engineer behind the electrification of, among other places, the city of Lyon. His patents allowed him to become a wealthy man and made him receive the Legion d'Honneur in 1889.

Around that time he retired to a small island near Trégastel, off the coast of Brittany, where between 1892 and 1896 he erected a neo-Gothic manor. Although the construction works were not finished in Abakanowicz's lifetime, the castle of Costaérès became a notable centre of Polish emigree culture, housing many notable artists, scientists and politicians. Among frequent guests of Abakanowicz were Aleksander Gierymski, Władysław Mickiewicz, Leon Wyczółkowski and Henryk Sienkiewicz. The latter became the closest friend of Abakanowicz. It was in Abakanowicz's villa in Parc St. Maur that he finished his The Teutonic Knights and The Polaniecki Family, while the Quo Vadis novel, for which Sienkiewicz was awarded with the Nobel Prize, was written entirely in Abakanowicz's manor.

Bruno Abakanowicz died suddenly on August 29, 1900. In his last will he made Sienkiewicz the tutor of his sole daughter, Zofia, who later graduated from the London School of Economics and the Sorbonne, and was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the World War II.

Nationality

He was born in the lands which were once part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some documents of the time hence refer to him as a Russian. Encyclopedia Britannica mentions him as a Lithuanian mathematician in its article on the integraph. He is considered a Pole by many due to his fluent command of the language, friendship with many leading Polish personalities of the time, and literary contributions in Polish.

Bibliography

Works by Abdank-Abakanowicz

1886. Les intégraphes. La courbe intégrale et ses applications. Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1886. Translated into German as Die Integraphen. Die Integralkurve und ihre Anwendungen, Teubner, Leipzig, 1889.