Abstract
I passed the final examination for my doctorate on May 10, 1911. The examiners were Hilbert, Runge, and Hartmann. Having thus completed my studies, I went to Lake Lugano in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, where I stayed for two weeks at the Hˆotel du Lac. It was perfectly located, and very peaceful, the guests being for the most part elderly couples putting to good use the money they had so labored to accumulate over the years. Each couple sat at its own little table looking bored—presumably they were no longer capable of pleasure at the sight of the Alps and the lake. Most interesting in Lugano are the small villages along the lakeshore—Oria, for example. The houses are all of stone, and are accessed from stairs carved in stone, rising from the shore. From Lugano I went to Milan. The Gothic style of the Milan Cathedral is awe-inspiring, with its thousands of spires and thousands of steps, with its rooftop balustrades, where each support of the handrail is capped with a head in low relief as meticulously carved as if it were crucial to the whole edifice. This fine work misleads one into thinking the interior should be equally rich, but instead it’s dark and austere. There it impresses by the massiveness of its columns and the chiaroscuro of the enormous enclosed spaces, relieved by the suppressed play of colored light from the stained glass windows. High up in the south wall one can spy an aperture, and down on the parquet floor there is a brass inlay on the same meridian of longitude, so placed that at true local noon time there appears a momentary flash of light at a spot on the north wall. I wanted to buy a Borsalino hat, a popular Italian hat with a moderately wide brim, so I went to the biggest hat shop I could find. There they looked at me disdainfully as they informed me that they did not sell such hats…. To this day I remain baffled by this event….
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Notes
- 1.
A company that produced hats, known particularly for its fedoras. Established in 1857 by Giuseppe Borsalino.
- 2.
A novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz.
- 3.
Installed in about 1254. Believed by some to have once adorned Trajan’s Arch. They were taken to Paris by Napoleon in 1797, and returned in 1815.
- 4.
They are usually said to have come from Egypt.
- 5.
Eugeniusz Romer (1871–1954), outstanding Polish geographer and cartographer. Founder of modern Polish cartography. Professor at the University of Lwów and the Jagiellonian University.
- 6.
Stanisław Zaremba (1863–1942), one of the internationally best-known Polish mathematicians of the time. Professor at the Jagiellonian University from 1900. Co-founded the Polish Mathematical Society in 1919.
- 7.
It is unclear whether he means that the axiom of completeness follows from the other axioms, or something else.
- 8.
Bibliographical data on all of Steinhaus’s publications as well as reprintings of the more important ones can be found in: H. Steinhaus, Selected Papers, PWN, Warsaw 1985. See also the following selection of his papers in Polish: H. Steinhaus, Między duchem a materią pośredniczy matematyka [Between Spirit and Matter There Exists Mathematics], Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa–Wrocław 2000.
- 9.
Polish poet and translator. Lived from 1880 to 1946.
- 10.
That is, whereby the electorate is subdivided into groups each with one vote. From the Latin curia, in early Roman times signifying a section of the people—a tribe, more or less.
- 11.
Władysław Leopold Jaworski (1865–1930), Polish lawyer, conservative politician, and professor at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków.
- 12.
Stańczyk (1480–1560?), the most famous court jester in Polish history. Became a symbolic figure in Poland, with patriotic associations. A conservative political group formed in Galicia following the collapse of the 1863 January Uprising called its political platform Teka Stańczyka (“Stańczyk’s Portfolio”), whence the name of the group: stańczycy.
- 13.
“The king’s man”
- 14.
Of Bełz, presumably.
- 15.
A tough, tightly woven fabric used to make overcoats, trousers, etc. May once have been the material of preference for garments worn by Jews; in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare has Shylock talk of his “Jewish gabardine.”
- 16.
Festungsartillerieregiment Freiherr von Rouvroy Nr. 5, named for the Austrian general J. Th. von Rouvroy (1727–1789).
- 17.
A village close to Kraków (now become part of that city).
- 18.
A tall cylindrical military cap, with a metal badge embossed with the Austro-Hungarian imperial double-headed eagle in front, and a pompom on top.
- 19.
Stefan Mazurkiewicz (1888–1945), influential Polish mathematician. Studied under Sierpiński and numbered Borsuk, Kuratowski, Knaster, Saks, and Zygmund among his students. Worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. Spent most of his career at the University of Warsaw.
- 20.
Zygmunt Weyberg (1872–1945), Polish crystallographer and mineralogist.
- 21.
Concessions allowing exploitation of forest resources and the lease of state-owned industrial enterprises.
- 22.
Stanisław Ruziewicz (1889–1941), Polish mathematician. A student of Sierpiński. One of the founders of the Lwów school of mathematics. On July 12, 1941, he was arrested and murdered by the Gestapo, along with other Lwów professors.
- 23.
Henri-L´eon Lebesgue (1875–1941), French mathematician. His generalization of the Riemann integral revolutionized integration theory.
- 24.
Stanisław Ciechanowski (1869–1945), originally Dean of the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków.
- 25.
In the First Balkan War, in 1912, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia attacked the Ottoman Empire, ending the latter’s five-century rule over most of the Balkans. The Second Balkan War (1913) was essentially a squabble over the spoils between Bulgaria and the other victors of the First Balkan War, with Romania and the Ottomans intervening to make territorial gains.
- 26.
A circus founded by the Dutchman Arnold van der Vegt in 1911, at one time featuring Tom Mix as the star attraction. The name was changed to “The Herman Renz Circus” in 1923.
- 27.
See Chapter 1
- 28.
The Polish Academy of Learning (before 1919 the Academy of Learning), founded in Kraków in 1872 and merged in 1951 with other institutions to form the Polish Academy of Sciences.
- 29.
The papers in question were written in French. The Polish word życzenie means “wish”.
- 30.
Fryderyk Zoll the younger (1865–1948), Polish jurist.
- 31.
Venice’s main waterfront boulevard.
- 32.
St. Mark’s Square.
- 33.
A hundred years later, perhaps the balance has been restored somewhat with the many excellent nature films now appearing on television.
- 34.
Otto Lindpaintner (1885–1976), German aviation pioneer.
- 35.
“But she stinks!”
- 36.
The Mocenigo family was prominent in Venice for more than four centuries. Several of its members served as doge.
- 37.
A statue formerly standing in the Villa Medici, carved by the Athenian artist Cleomenes in the second century BC.
- 38.
A famous Roman sculpture in marble after a lost Greek original of the third century BC, now in the Uffizi collection in Florence. (Several copies have been made of the sculpture, so perhaps the author saw one of these in Rome—or perhaps he actually saw it in Florence.)
- 39.
Charles ´ Emile Picard (1856–1941), French mathematician. Known mainly for his work in complex analysis and differential equations.
- 40.
Henryk Gustaw Lauer (1890–1939), Polish mathematician, economist, and social activist. A leading figure in the Polish Communist Party 1920–1922. Victim of the Stalinist purges.
- 41.
Aleksander Rajchman (1890–1940), Polish mathematician. Worked at the University of Warsaw from 1919 to 1921. Obtained his Ph.D. under Steinhaus at the University of Lwów in 1921. Habilitated at the University of Warsaw in 1925, he was a Privatdozent there till 1939. In the late 1930s lectured for a time at the Coll`ege de France in Hadamard’s seminar. Arrested by the Gestapo in April 1940, he perished in the Sachenhausen concentration camp later that year.
- 42.
A paper on the properties of a function given in the form of a trigonometric series. It was originally part of Riemann’s Habilitation dissertation.
- 43.
This states that if a periodic function with period 2π is integrable over the interval [−π, π], then for each point x in that interval, the convergence of the function’s Fourier series at x depends only on the behavior of the function in an arbitrarily small neighborhood of x.
- 44.
Flavius Claudius Iulianus (331–363), Roman emperor from 355 to 363. Took command of the western provinces in 355 as Emperor in the West. On the death of Constantius, Emperor in the East, in 360, he was proclaimed Emperor at the Thermes de Cluny in Paris, whose Gallo-Roman ruins form part of the present-day Mus´ee de Cluny. A non-Christian, he attempted to revive traditional Roman religious practices.
- 45.
Pepin “the Short” (714–768), king of the Franks from 752 to 768. (Possibly the museum guide misled the author, since the three crowns in question are those of seventh century Gothic kings. It is known for certain that one of these was the Visigothic king Reccesvinthus.)
- 46.
The title character of a novel by Romain Rolland (1866–1944), a sculptor.
- 47.
A Western Christian military order endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church in 1129, and active in the crusades.
- 48.
Now called the Pr´efet de Paris.
- 49.
Much of this collection was moved to the Mus´ee d’Orsay in 1986.
- 50.
No longer at this location.
- 51.
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (1848–1907), French novelist, most famous for his novel `A rebours. His work expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism.
- 52.
Jean Cauvin (or John Calvin) (1509–1564), highly influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. Founded the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism.
- 53.
Parisian seamstresses or salesgirls.
- 54.
“Colleague Shapiro, could I please have a piece of this stuffed fish!” The sentence mixes Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and French words.
- 55.
The leading noble family of eighteenth and nineteenth century Poland.
- 56.
Till 1971 the central wholesale marketplace of Paris.
- 57.
Especially on the Boulevard de Clichy in the district of Pigalle, where the Moulin Rouge was built in 1889. And then there is Montmartre.
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Steinhaus, H. (2015). The Return Home. In: Burns, R., Szymaniec, I., Weron, A. (eds) Mathematician for All Seasons. Vita Mathematica, vol 18. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21984-4_5
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