Lwów School of Mathematics

Part of the Scottish Book with Stefan Banach's and Stanisław Ulam's notes.

The Lwów School of Mathematics (Polish: Lwowska szkoła matematyczna; Ukrainian: Львівська математична школа) was a group of mathematicians who worked between the two World Wars in Lviv, then known as Lwów and located in Poland, but now located in western 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. 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.

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 West.

Lwów School of Mathematics in 1930

Notable members of the Lwów School of Mathematics included:

• Stefan Banach
• Feliks Barański
• Władysław Orlicz
• Stanisław Saks
• Hugo Steinhaus
• Stanisław Mazur
• Stanisław Ulam
• Juliusz Schauder
• Mark Kac
• Antoni Łomnicki
• Stefan Kaczmarz
• Herman Auerbach
• Włodzimierz Stożek
• Stanisław Ruziewicz

See also

• Polish School of Mathematics
• Kraków School of Mathematics
• Warsaw School of Mathematics

References

• Ulam, Stanisław Marcin (1976). Adventures of a Mathematician, illustrated with photographs. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-15064-6.