Lwów School of Mathematics
Research collective
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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[1] 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:
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.[2]
The end of the school
First the Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia in 1939, then the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, caused many of the mathematicians to flee Lwów. Few of them survived World War II, but after the war a group including some of the original community carried on their work in Wrocław in Silesia, after the post-war Polish population transfers. A number of the prewar mathematicians, prominent among them Stanisław Ulam, became famous for work done in the United States.