Polish Academy of Sciences

Staszic Palace, seat of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in downtown Warsaw. Before it sits Bertel Thorvaldsen's statue of Nicolaus Copernicus.

The Polish Academy of Sciences, headquartered in Warsaw, is one of two Polish institutions having the nature of an academy of sciences.

History

The Polish Academy of Sciences (Polish: Polska Akademia Nauk, abbreviated PAN) is a Polish state learned institution, headquartered in Warsaw, that was established in 1952 by the merger of earlier learned societies, including the Polish Academy of Learning (Polska Akademia Umiejętności, abbreviated PAU), with its seat in Kraków, and the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning, which had been founded in the late 18th century.

The Polish Academy of Sciences functions as a learned society acting through an elected corporation of leading scholars and research institutions. The Academy has also, operating through its committees, become a major scientific advisory body.

Another aspect of the Academy is its coordination and overseeing of numerous (several dozens) of research institutes. PAN institutes employ over 2,000 people, and are funded by about a third of the Polish government's budget for science.

In 1989, the Polish Academy of Learning, in Kraków, resumed its independent existence, separate from the Polish Academy of Sciences, in Warsaw.

Institutes

The Polish Academy of Sciences includes numerous institutes, such as:

• Institute for the History of Science, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Institute of Economics of the Polish Academy of Sciences
• Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences
• Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology
• Polish Institute of Physical Chemistry
• Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

Noted members

• Tomasz Dietl, physicist
• Maria Janion, scholar, critic and theoretician of literature
• Zbigniew Jedliński, chemist
• Franciszek Kokot, nephrologist
• Leszek Kołakowski, philosopher
• Roman Kozłowski, paleontologist
• Rafal Ohme, social psychologist
• Bohdan Paczyński, astrophysicist
• Andrzej Schinzel, mathematician
• Andrzej Trautman, physicist
• Aleksander Wolszczan, astronomer
• Czeslaw Olech, mathematician

Foreign members

• Aage Bohr, physicist
• Karl Alexander Müller, physicist
• Roger Penrose, mathematician
• Carlo Rubbia, physicist
• Boleslaw Szymanski, computer scientist
• Chen Ning Yang, physicist
• George Zarnecki, art historian

Periodicals

• Acta Arithmetica
• Acta Ornithologica
• Acta Palaeontologica Polonica
• Acta Physica Polonica
• Archaeologia Polona
• Fundamenta Mathematicae

See also

• Academy of Sciences
• French Academy of Sciences
• Polish Academy of Learning (headquartered in Kraków)
• Poznań Society of Friends of Learning
• Royal Society
• Unipress
• Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning

External links

• PAN website (English)