In the University Town Lwów

Steinhaus, Hugo

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-21984-4_7

Hugo Steinhaus⁶

Part of the book series: Vita Mathematica ((VM,volume 18))

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Abstract

When I arrived in Lwów, I found that the things I had left in storage —under the less than watchful eye of a Mr. Zawadzki—had been stolen, and that there was no room to be had in my own house, so I had to rent a basement flat. I eventually lost the lawsuit over our possessions, and it also turned out that the contract of purchase and sale of the house was not legally valid because the seller, who died a few months following the transaction, was not the legal owner of the whole property. I had now to validate the contract, in particular by obtaining the signatures of the owner’s heirs. All I could do was persevere in the face of these difficulties.

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Notes

1.
Polskie Towarzystwo Matematyczne (PTM). This was to grow out of a mathematical society formed in Kraków in 1919. (See Chapter 6 for more on the initial stages of the Mathematical Society in Kraków.)
2.
Zdzisław Krygowski (1872–1955) was then a professor at the Lwów Polytechnic, where he had been rector in 1917–1918. He moved to Poznań University in 1920.
3.
Placyd Dziwiński (1851–1936), Polish mathematician. Worked in geometry and the history of mathematics.
4.
Władysław Roman Orlicz (1903–1990), Polish mathematician. Worked mainly in topology and functional analysis. In 1937 he was appointed professor at Poznań University, where after World War II he created a highly reputed center for functional analysis.
5.
Herman Auerbach (1901–1942), Polish mathematician. Professor at Lwów University. Remained in Lwów all his life, until sent to the Bełżec concentration camp in 1942, where he perished.
6.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872–1970), prominent English philosopher, mathematical logician, historian, and social critic. The work in question may have been Principia Mathematica by him and A. N. Whitehead, in which they attempted to derive mathematics from basic postulates of logic.
7.
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963), Polish philosopher and logician of the Lwów-Warsaw school.
8.
Zygmunt Zawirski (1882–1948), Polish philosopher and logician. Later held professorships in Poznań and Kraków.
9.
Tadeusz Czeżowski (1889–1981), Polish philosopher and logician of the Lwów-Warsaw school of logic.
10.
Józef Wittlin (1896–1976), Polish expressionist poet, essayist, novelist, and translator. His most highly regarded work is the 1936 novel Salt of the Earth. Lived in the US from 1941.
11.
Leon Lichtenstein (1878–1933), Polish-German mathematician. Worked on the calculus of variations, partial differential equations, and potential theory. A founder, and the first editor, of Mathematische Zeitschrift. Abandoned his position at the University of Leipzig on the accession of Hitler to power in 1933, and returned to Poland, where he died in Zakopane.
12.
Issai Schur (1875–1941), Jewish mathematician. Became professor at the University of Berlin in 1919, remaining there till dismissed by the Nazis in 1935. Among his students were Richard Brauer, Bernhard H. Neumann, and Richard Rado. Worked mainly in the theory of group representations. Among other things, introduced the “Schur multiplier” of a group, shown some 40 years later to be the second cohomology group of the group over the complex numbers.
13.
Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach (1886–1982), German mathematician. Known in particular for his work in complex analysis. In 1916 formulated a famous conjecture on the condition on a holomorphic function’s Taylor series for it to map the unit disc injectively into the complex plane, settled by Louis de Branges in 1984. A Nazi sympathizer, was involved in the repression of Jewish colleagues in the 1930s—including Edmund Landau and Issai Schur—and co-founded a “German mathematics” movement and journal.
14.
James Franck (1882–1964), German physicist. Appointed Professor of Experimental Physics in G¨ottingen in 1920, and, together with Max Born turned G¨ottingen into an important center for quantum mechanics. (In particular, Robert Oppenheimer came to further his studies with this group.) Nobel laureate for physics in 1925. Moved with his family to the US in the 1930s to escape Nazism.
15.
Quantum mechanics.
16.
Emil Artin (1898–1962), Austrian-American mathematician. Came to G¨ottingen in 1921 to pursue post-doctoral studies in mathematics and mathematical physics with Courant and Hilbert. During his year in G¨ottingen worked closely with Emmy Noether and Helmut Hasse.
17.
Cassel (Kassel from 1926) is a town in northern Hesse. Hannoversch M¨unden is a town in Lower Saxony at the confluence of the Fulda and Werra rivers, notable for its old houses, some dating from more than 600 years ago.
18.
Ethnography is the branch of anthropology where peoples are studied via their cultural practices and artefacts.
19.
Alexander Markowich Ostrowski (1893–1986), mathematician. Born in Kiev, he studied under Hensel in Marburg, and after World War I wrote his doctoral dissertation in G¨ottingen. Worked as Hecke’s assistant in Hamburg from 1920, where he completed his Habilitation in 1922. Wilhelm Blaschke (1885–1962), Austro-Hungarian differential and integral geometer.
20.
Hans Adolph Rademacher (1892–1969), German mathematician. Worked in mathematical analysis and number theory. Dismissed from his position at the University of Breslau in 1933 for publicly supporting the Weimar Republic, he moved to the US, obtaining a position at the University of Pennsylvania.
21.
Meaning “beautiful parish”.
22.
The Weimar Republic, a parliamentary republic established in Germany to replace the Imperium. It was beset with many difficulties, some resulting from the harsh penalties imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, and including a period of hyperinflation. It ended, in effect, in 1933, with Hitler’s accession to power.
23.
That is, assumed to be just additive, rather than fully linear?
24.
Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930), German admiral. Considered the founder of the German Imperial Navy.
25.
In 1922 Lichtenstein left his position in M¨unster to take up a professorship at the University of Leipzig. He had been professor at the Polytechnic in Berlin-Charlottenburg 1919–1920, transferring in 1920 to M¨unster.
26.
A region of present-day southwest Poland, rich in mineral and natural resources. Ruled by Prussia and then Germany from the late eighteenth century to the end of World War I. The eastern part was transferred to Poland after that war (with an Austrian remnant going to Czechoslovakia) and, after World War II, most of the rest also became part of Poland.
27.
Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin (1894–1959), celebrated Soviet probabilist.
28.
William Feller (1906–1970), Croatian-American probabilist. Born in Zagreb to a Polish-Jewish father and a Croatian-Austrian Catholic mother. After evading the Nazis for some years from 1933, he arrived in the US in 1939, ending up at Princeton University.
29.
Based on the notion of independent events in a probability space.
30.
Jakub Karol Parnas (1884–1949), prominent Polish-Jewish-Soviet biochemist. Head of the Department of Medical Chemistry in the University of Lwów 1920–1941. He collaborated with the Soviet regime from the time of its invasion of Poland in 1939. Moved to the Soviet Union in 1941, where he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences and served as Director of the Institute of Biological Sciences in Moscow 1943–1947. In January 1949, in the course of a Stalinist purge, he was arrested by the NKVD on the false charge of spying for the West and imprisoned in the Lubyanka, where he died.
31.
A popular book in Poland up to World War II.
32.
New Year’s Eve, named after Pope Sylvester I.
33.
A group of seven professors from G¨ottingen University who, in 1837, protested against the annulment of the constitution of the Kingdom of Hanover and refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king Ernest Augustus.
34.
Juliusz Paweł Schauder (1899–1943), Polish-Jewish mathematician, working mainly in functional analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics. Collaborated with Jean Leray in Paris from about 1932 to 1935. Appointed senior assistant at the University of Lwów in 1935. Known, in particular, for the concept of a Schauder basis for a Banach space and the Leray–Schauder principle providing a means of establishing solutions of partial differential equations based on a priori estimates. Murdered by the Gestapo in 1943. Jacob Halaunbrenner (1902–1943). Murdered by the Gestapo in France in 1943. Stanisław Mazur (1905–1981) was supervised by Banach for his doctorate. Became one of the leading experts on functional analysis at the University of Lwów.
35.
Kazimierz Władysław Bartel (1882–1941), Polish mathematician and politician. Member of the Polish parliament from 1922. Prime Minister of Poland five times between 1926 and 1930. In the 1930s wrote a monograph on perspective in European art. Murdered by the Nazis in 1941 after refusing to form a Polish puppet government.
36.
Kazimierz Kuratowski (1896–1980), prominent Polish mathematician specializing in logic and set theory. Gave an alternative axiomatization of topology to the one now standard. A leading representative of the Warsaw school of mathematics. Appointed to the Lwów Polytechnic in 1927.
37.
Stefan Kaczmarz (1895–1939) obtained his doctorate and Habilitation at Lwów University. Vanished during World War II. (There are claims that he was murdered by the NKVD at Katyń in 1940.) Władysław Nikliborc (1889–1948) also obtained his Habilitation at Lwów University.
38.
Jan Blaton (1907–1948), Polish physicist. Stanisław Marcin Ulam (1909–1984), Polish-Jewish-American mathematician. Went to the US in 1938 as a Harvard Junior Fellow. Returned to Poland on the eve of World War II, but eventually managed to regain the US. Participated in the Manhattan Project. Well known for his work in various fields: number theory, set theory, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
39.
Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński (1891–1965), Polish linguist specializing in Slavic languages. Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1895–1978), Polish historical linguist. One of the greatest of twentieth century scholars of Indo-European languages. Professor at the University of Lwów from 1928. After World War II held professorships at the universities of Wrocław and Kraków.
40.
Paul Antoine Aristide Montel (1876–1975), French mathematician. Worked in complex analysis. Jacques Salomon Hadamard (1865–1963), eminent French mathematician. Made major contributions to number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. The first, with Charles-Jean de la Vall´ee-Poussin, to prove the “Prime Number Theorem”.
41.
Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899–1983), Polish-Jewish mathematician, working mainly in classical analysis. He studied under Hadamard, and was an early member of the Bourbaki group. In 1938 appointed Hadamard’s successor as professor at the Coll`ege de France. During World War II he was at the Rice Institute in Houston.
42.
Maria Kasterska (1894–1969), Polish writer. Earned a doctorate in French literature at the Sorbonne.
43.
Petre Sergescu (1893–1954), Romanian mathematician and historian of science.
44.
Adamo (Adam) Didur (1873–1946), talented Polish bass opera star. Performed in Europe and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
45.
Jan Wiktor Kiepura (1902–1966), Polish tenor and actor. Emigrated to the US in the late 1930s to evade Nazism. His brother Władysław (1904–1988) also sang in the opera.
46.
The pastime of skipping flat stones over the surface of a stretch of water so that they bounce as many times as possible.
47.
“Black Mountain”. A mountain range in the Eastern Carpathians. Part of Ukraine since the end of World War II.
48.
Stanisław Vincenz (1888–1971), Polish novelist and essayist, lover and connoisseur of the Hutsul people of the Eastern Carpathians, and the thought and art of Ancient Greece.
49.
According to the Greek myth Achilles’ mother Thetis, a nymph, holding her son Achilles by a heel, dipped him in the river Styx in order that the sacred waters render him invulnerable. However the heel that remained dry was left vulnerable.
50.
The Hutsuls (or Huculs) are an ethnic group of highlanders of mixed Rusyn and Wallachian origin, living in the Eastern Carpathians.
51.
English version published in London in 1955.
52.
A tributary of the Prut.
53.
A small breed of pony from the Carpathians, noted for their great endurance.
54.
A hundred kilograms.
55.
“Ivan the Priest”, the third highest peak of the Czarnohora range.
56.
A mountain range in the outer Eastern Carpathians adjacent to the Czarnohora range.
57.
A town lying at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, a range in the Carpathians.
58.
Alfred Tarski (1901–1983), Polish logician and mathematician. A leading light of the Lwów-Warsaw school of logic. Held a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley from 1942. One of the most outstanding mathematical logicians of the twentieth century. Famous in particular for the “Banach–Tarski paradox”.
59.
“White Water”, a certain mountain stream.
60.
A branch of the Jaworowa Valley.
61.
A zoo in the then private park of Prince Hohenlohe in the Tatra Mountains.
62.
A pass in the Tatra Mountains. The eastern slopes of the pass descend to the Rohatka Valley, an upper branch of the Staroleśna Valley.
63.
Low, shrubby pine trees. A sort of sap from the buds and cones can be boiled down to a concentrate and combined with sugar to make “pine syrup.”
64.
Or Maryszewska, a nearby mountain.
65.
It began on September 7, 1927.
66.
The first issue of Studia Mathematica, with Banach and Steinhaus as editors, appeared in 1929.
67.
Founded in 1919. Stefan Banach, Franciszek Leja, Otto Nikod´ym, Stanisław Zaremba, and Kazimierz Żórawski were among its founding members.
68.
John von Neumann (1903–1957), Hungarian-American mathematician. Made major contributions to many fields. Regarded as one of the greatest of twentieth century mathematicians. Frank J. Ayres, Jr. (1901–1994), American mathematician. Gordon Thomas Whyburn (1904–1969), American mathematician. Morgan Ward (1901–1963), American mathematician.
69.
This may be Hermann Zeltner (1903–1975), German philosopher.
70.
´Emile Meyerson (1859–1933), Polish-born French chemist, epistemologist, and philosopher of science.
71.
Explanation in the Sciences and Identity and Reality.
72.
Paul Langevin (1872–1946), French physicist. One of the founders of the Comit´e de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, an antifascist organization created in the wake of the riots by supporters of the French far right in 1934.
73.
Louis-C´esar-Victor-Maurice, 6i`eme duc de Broglie (1875–1960), French physicist. Not to be confused with his younger brother Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond (1892–1987), who introduced the idea of electron waves.
74.
Hydrotherapy, formerly called “hydropathy” or “water cure”, involves the use of water for pain relief and treatment of illness.
75.
A game similar to roulette, but simpler and faster.
76.
An entremets is literally a dish between main courses.
77.
That is, hydrotherapeutic.
78.
German city on the Moselle.
79.
That is, the occupation of Alsace-Lorraine by France in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles.
80.
“Black Gate”, a large Roman city gate in Trier, so named in the Middle Ages because of its darkened sandstone.
81.
Felix Hausdorff (1868–1942), German-Jewish mathematician. Considered one of the founders of modern topology. Committed suicide with his wife to avoid being sent to a concentration camp.
82.
Hans Lewy (1904–1988), German-American mathematician. Known chiefly for his work in partial differential equations. Otto Eduard Neugebauer (1899–1990), Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science. By interpreting clay tablets of the ancient Babylonians, revealed that they knew much more mathematics and astronomy that had been previously thought. Amalie Emmy Noether (1882–1935), German-American mathematician. Made ground-breaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Considered the greatest female mathematician of all time. G´abor Szeg˝o (1895–1985), Hungarian-American mathematician. Moved to the US in the mid-1930s.
83.
The reluctance of some German mathematicians to attend the ICM in Bologna in 1928 had to do with a quarrel going back to World War I, for more details on which, see below.
84.
For bios of these delegates, see earlier footnotes.
85.
Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (1885–1955), all-round German mathematician and theoretical physicist. Early member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Oliver Dimon Kellogg (1878–1932), American mathematician. Obtained his doctorate in G¨ottingen under Hilbert. Charles-Jean ´ Etienne Gustave Nicolas Levieux, Baron de la Vall´ee-Poussin (1866–1962), Belgian mathematician. Best known for proving, at the same time as Hadamard, the Prime Number Theorem. Alfr´ed Haar (1885–1933), Hungarian mathematician. His doctorate was supervised by Hilbert in G¨ottingen. Haar measure, Haar wavelets, and the Haar transform are all due to him. D´enes K˝onig (1884–1944), Jewish-Hungarian mathematician. Wrote the first textbook on graph theory.
86.
Italian mathematician and physicist. Well known for his approach to solving integral equations. Lived from 1860 to 1940.
87.
Max Planck (1858–1947), German physicist. Founder of quantum theory. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918.
88.
In 1915, Planck publicly voiced his disagreement with parts of the Manifesto, and in 1916 signed a declaration against German annexationism.
89.
A battle marking the end of the war on the Italian front, and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
90.
Mih´aly, Count K´arolyi (1875–1955), Hungarian statesman. Appointed Hungarian prime minister on October 31, 1918, by Emperor Charles I of Austria, in recognition of Hungary as a separate state.
91.
In fact, the Tower of Pisa was intended to stand vertically, but began to lean in the early stages of its construction in 1173 because of a poorly laid foundation and loose substrate.
92.
Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), Italian physician and physicist. Pioneer in bioelectricity. Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (1745–1827), Italian physicist. Developed the first electric cell in 1800.
93.
Benito Mussolini had become Prime Minister of Italy in 1922 by means of a coup d’´etat by his National Fascist Party.
94.
Bronisław Knaster (1893–1980), Polish mathematician. Worked in point-set topology.
95.
See: F. Frankl und L. Pontrjagin, “Ein Knotensatz mit Anwendung auf die Dimensionstheorie” (A Theorem on Knots with an Application to Dimension Theory), Mathematische Annalen 102 (1929), pp. 785–789. Here it is shown that in fact every simple closed polygon in three-dimensional space is the boundary of some orientable surface. Such surfaces were later called “spanning surfaces” for the knot represented by the polygon.
96.
In Polish: Monografie Matematyczne. This was intended to be a mathematical series of high-quality research monographs in areas of mathematics where Polish mathematicians were prominent. Prior to 1939 ten volumes in the series appeared, authored by such notable mathematicians as Banach, Saks, Sierpiński, Kaczmarz, Steinhaus, etc.
97.
Flavius Theodoricus or Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths (471–526). Ruler of Italy from 493 to 526.
98.
Aelia Galla Placidia (392–450), daughter of the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, and consort of Ataulf, king of the Goths, and then of Constantius III, Western Roman Emperor.
99.
This may be Louis Charles Karpinsky (1878–1956), American historian of mathematics and cartography.
100.
Franciszek Karpiński (1741–1825), the leading sentimental Polish poet of the Enlightenment. Laura and Philo was one of his most popular love poems.
101.
Sienkiewicz’s novel Selim Mirza appeared in 1876.
102.
Bruno Abdank-Abakanowicz (1852–1900), a Lithuanian-born mathematician, inventor, and electrical engineer. Among his many inventions was the “integraph”, which, given the graph of a function, draws the graph of its integral.
103.
Antoni Słonimski (1895–1976), Polish poet, translator, and journalist. Known for his devotion to pacifism and social justice. Converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. One of his great grandfathers was Abraham Stern (Sztern).
104.
Polish-Jewish scholar and inventor. One of his inventions was a computing machine, perfected in 1817. Lived from 1769 to 1842.
105.
The most centrally located and one of the most elegant streets of Florence.
106.
George David Birkhoff (1884–1944). Best known for his Ergodic Theorem. Made significant contributions also to number theory, graph theory, and theoretical physics. The title of his talk at the ICM in 1928 was “Quelques ´el´ements math´ematiques de l’art”. His paper completing the proof left unfinished by Poincar´e was entitled “Proof of Poincar´e’s geometric problem” (published in Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.).
107.
“It’s a piece of disconcerting childishness.”
108.
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in such a way that it sounded like a news bulletin about an invasion in progress. The hoax caused general panic in the US.
109.
Old Bridge.
110.
Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, musician, and soldier.
111.
The Romanesque, crenellated fortress palace dating from the early fourth century and now functioning as Florence’s Town Hall.
112.
A small town in the mountains just to the northeast of Florence.
113.
“Criticism”
114.
American automobile industrialist. Quoted in the Chicago Tribune of May 25, 1916 as saying: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history worth a tinker’s damn is the history we made today.” Also said reading muddled his brain. Between 1919 and 1927 published The Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper promoting his anti-Semitic views.
115.
Hungarian mathematician. Made fundamental contributions to functional analysis. Lived from 1880 to 1956.
116.
The noble family ruling Verona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
117.
A lakeside resort in Lombardy, with hotels, a promenade, impressive Botanical Gardens, and Vittoriale degli Italiani, a former residence of the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio.
118.
Arnold B¨ocklin (1827–1901), Swiss symbolist painter. Best known for his five versions of Isle of the Dead.
119.
A pass through the Alps between Italy and Austria, one of only a few, and for this reason much fought over.
120.
The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye was signed in 1919 between the Allies of World War I and the new Republic of Austria. The treaty defined the terms of the dissolution of the Austrian Empire—in particular the considerably constricted new Austrian borders—and specified war reparations to be paid to the Allies.
121.
Now capital of Slovakia. Situated very close to Vienna.
122.
A square in central Vienna on which the official residence of the former Austrian State Chancellor, today the Austrian prime minister, is situated.
123.
A large public park in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt.
124.
A new state formed in 1918 from regions of the defunct Austrian Empire.
125.
A few days later Hitler declared the Czech part (Bohemia and Moravia) of Czechoslovakia a German protectorate, and Slovakia became a puppet state of Germany, taking part in the Polish campaign of September 1939 as allies of Germany.
126.
In 1918 the International Danube Commission had been set up, replacing the earlier European Commission. The parties to the commission were the riparian states, dominated by Germany.
127.
Aurel Boleslav Stodola (1859–1942), ethnic Slovak and pioneer in the area of thermodynamical technology and its applications. His book Steam and Gas Turbines, first published in English in 1927, became a basic reference in the field.
128.
That is, lecturers.
129.
Ludwik Sternbach (1905–1942), Polish mathematician. Studied at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów. Worked as Banach’s Assistent and as a Gymnasium teacher. Killed by the Nazis in 1942.
130.
Since Fundamenta was dedicated to publishing papers in that area.
131.
Wojciech Sylwester Piotr Rubinowicz (1889–1974), Polish theoretical physicist.
132.
Following World War II, The Scottish Book was brought to Wrocław by Banach’s widow. A copy now resides in the library of the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wrocław. A typed English version can be viewed at the website: http://banach.univ.gda.pl/pdf/ks-szkocka3ang.pdf. A published English version is also available as: R. Daniel Mauldin (ed.), The Scottish Book: Mathematics from the Scottish Caf´e, Birkh¨auser Boston, Boston, MA, 1981. The tradition started by Lwów mathematicians was continued for many years by Wrocław mathematicians in the form of The New Scottish Book.
133.
This, also known as the Banach–Steinhaus theorem, states that a pointwise bounded family of continuous linear operators from a Banach space to a normed space is uniformly bounded.
134.
This is the celebrated “Banach–Tarski paradox”. The “pieces” are exceedingly complicated subsets of points scattered throughout the ball. The proof uses the Axiom of Choice in an essential way.
135.
Built in 1897 for exhibitions of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists including Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Max Kurzweil, and others.
136.
The Archcathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
137.
“not just to the city (of Rome) but to the whole world”
138.
Or Congress Poland, the northeastern third of Poland ruled by Russia from 1815 to 1915, where from 1905 to 1907 there occurred many armed insurrections of Polish workers, peasants, and students against the Russian controlled government—the wider ramifications of the Russian Revolution of 1905, subsequent to Russia’s defeat by Japan.
139.
Roman Negrusz (1874–1926), Polish experimental physicist.
140.
In 1930, an aging Marshal Piłsudski was called upon to end the chaotic political situation in Poland. Among his first actions on assuming power was to arrest several former members of the opposition and imprison them in the Brest Fortress (formerly known as the Brest-Litovsk Fortress; the Polish name of the city is Brześć Litewski), built by Russia in the early nineteenth century.
141.
Following on Piłsudski’s coup d’´etat of May 1926, a Polish political movement calling itself “Sanation” (Piłsudski’s watchword, from the Latin word sanatio for “healing”), and led by close associates of Piłsudski, came to power on a platform of the primacy of national over democratic interests.
142.
Janusz Jędrzejewicz (1885–1951), Polish politician and educator, one of the leaders of the Sanation movement, and a former aide to Piłsudski. Prime minister of Poland from 1933 to 1934.
143.
Franciszek Gr¨oer (1887–1965), Polish pediatrician and professor at the University of Lwów. Manager of the Lwów Opera 1931–1933, and well known for his photography. Director of the Institute of Mother and Child in Warsaw 1951–1961.
144.
Clemens Peter Freiherr von Pirquet (1874–1929), Austrian scientist and pediatrician, known for contributions to immunology and bacteriology. Devised the test for tuberculosis involving the inoculation of a suspected tuberculosis case with tuberculin, an extract taken from the tuberculosis bacterium, to see if there is an allergic reaction caused by the prior presence of that bacterium.
145.
Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch (1843–1910), German physician. Isolated the tuberculosis bacillus in 1882. Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine for 1905.
146.
In fact the author of the rejoinder was Mieczysław Michałowicz (1876–1965), Polish physician, social activist, and politician. Taught pediatrics at Warsaw University from 1920 to 1931. (The clash of opinions was recorded in Pediatria Polska 1935, Vol. 15, Fasc. 6, containing the proceedings of the Fifth Congress of Polish Pediatricians in Łódź, November 1–3, 1935, at which Franciszek Gr¨oer gave a lecture entitled “Zasady patergometrii i allergometrii” (The principles of patergometry and allergometry) (pp. 407–419), and Mieczysław Michałowicz responded in the discussion following the lecture (pp. 421–423).)
147.
Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956), Polish logician and philosopher. Pioneer investigator of multi-valued logics. Born in Lwów. Stanisław Leśniewski (1886–1939), Polish mathematician, logician, and philosopher.
148.
These were published as commentaries arising from the post-lecture discussion: Jan Grączewski, “Uwagi matematyka do odczytu o patergometrii i o allergometrii” (Remarks of a mathematician concerning the lecture on patergometry and allergometry) (pp. 433–438), and Józef Marzecki, “Matematyka i medycyna” (Mathematics and medicine) (pp. 426–432).
149.
A tale told by Ali the Persian to the sleepless Caliph Harun al-Rashid, about how a Kurd stole his bag, and when asked to describe its contents before a judge, enumerated at great length an extremely improbable set of items, including carpets, tables, a pregnant cat, two beds, a female bear, a lioness and two lions,….
150.
Polish Mathesis. A monthly devoted to the science of numbers and methodology, first published in 1926.
151.
The “Steinhaus longimeter” consists of a transparent sheet on which three congruent square grids of side 3.82 mm are marked, two of which are rotated with respect to the third through 30^∘ and 60^∘ respectively. Placed on a sheet of paper on which a curve is drawn, the number of intersections of the curve with the lines of the longimeter gives the approximate length of the curve in millimeters.
152.
Seweryn Krzemieniewski and Stanisław Kulczyński were from the Department of Botany (specializing mainly in floristics), Wojciech Rogala was in the Department of Geology, and Julian Tokarski was head of the Department of Mineralogy and Petrography.
153.
Now Vilnius, capital of Lithuania.
154.
Julian Czyżewski (1890–1968), Polish geographer. Studied and worked at the University of Lwów between the wars.
155.
The academic year 1931–1932.
156.
That is, rule by a child or children.
157.
Wacławski was killed during an anti-Semitic uprising by Polish students in Wilno.
158.
Roman Longchamps de B´erier (1883–1941), Polish lawyer and professor. Last Rector at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów. Murdered by the Nazis in the Massacre of the Lwów Professors.
159.
Edmund Jan Bulanda (1882–1951), Polish archaeologist. Appointed Rector of Lwów University in 1938. When the university was closed by the Nazis in 1941, he continued as Rector of the “underground University of Lwów” for the duration of the war.
160.
The traditional lower house of the Polish parliament.
161.
Although this term has a variety of meanings, here it refers to people of what was south-eastern Galicia and the eastern Carpathians, who spoke Ukrainian and called themselves Rusyns. The issue in question had to do with their desire to be given separate national status.
162.
That is, the Ruthenians.
163.
Beck von Mannagetta, Leo, and Kelle, Karl von (Eds.): Die ¨osterreichischen Universit¨atsgesetze. Sammlung der f¨ur die ¨osterreichischen Universit¨aten g¨ultigen Gesetze, Verordnungen, Erl¨asse, Studien- und Pr¨ufungsordnungen (The laws of Austrian Universities. A collection of ordinances, edicts, and regulations relating to education and examinations at Austrian universities), Manz: Wien, 1904.
164.
“Kraków Suburb” Avenue, one of the grandest streets in Warsaw.
165.
A city on the Prut, now in western Ukraine.
166.
Apolinary Tarnawski (1851–1943) established his Kosów sanitorium using natural medicines and procedures in 1891.
167.
At that time of the Great Depression the złoty was worth about ten US cents.
168.
A cake made from caramel, honey, and poppy seeds, sometimes with walnuts or almonds.
169.
A grosz is a hundredth of a złoty.
170.
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, the Hutsuls living in Pokuttya are famous for their artistic jewelry with inlays of—among other things—mother-of-pearl and glass beads.
171.
The region around the upper Prut, which changed hands several times over the centuries. It belonged to Poland from 1919 till 1939 (and during certain earlier periods).
172.
Venice was under Austrian rule from 1797, when it was handed over to Austria by Napoleon, till 1866, when Austria was defeated in the Seven Weeks’ War with Prussia and had to cede Venice to the newly independent Kingdom of Italy.
173.
A word used by Ukrainians for thick woolen blankets.
174.
Roman Rencki (1867–1941), Head of the Institute of Internal Medicine at Lwów University. Murdered by the Gestapo in the Massacre of the Lwów Professors in 1941.
175.
Paweł Ostern (1902–1943), brilliant Polish biochemist. Committed suicide while being arrested by the Gestapo.
176.
Tadeusz Baranowski (1910–1993) was then completing his medical studies under Parnas in Lwów. Ultimately pursued a highly successful academic career in medicine, at first in Lwów, and later in Wrocław. Rector of the Wrocław Academy of Medicine 1965–1968.
177.
In fact it was Gustaw M¨uller, the husband of Felicja, the eldest of the author’s sisters, who helped in the matter in question.
178.
Marinus van der Lubbe (1909–1934), a Dutch communist, fled from Holland to Germany in 1933, where he worked in the communist underground. Accused of setting the Reichstag fire, he was guillotined in January 1934.
179.
The other four defendants at the trial, Georgi Dimitrov, Ernst Torgler, Blagoi Popov, and Vassili Tanev, were cleared.
180.
Polish-born (in Lwów) Belgian classical pianist and pedagogue. Lived from 1896 to 1985.
181.
Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946), Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 to 1945. Hanged for war crimes following the Nuremberg Trials.
182.
The Polish version of a supreme court.
183.
Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem (BBWR), an ostensibly non-political organization existing from 1928 to 1935, affiliated with Józef Piłsudski and his Sanation movement.
184.
Emmanuel de Grouchy, Second Marquis de Grouchy (1766–1847), French general and marshal.
185.
Father Adam Gerstmann (1873–1940), Polish Catholic priest, doctor of theology, professor at Lwów University and its rector in the academic years 1928/29 and 1932/33.
186.
Kamil Stefko (1875–1966), professor at the University of Wrocław after the war. Founder and first Dean of the Faculty of Law at that university.
187.
Karol Borsuk (1905–1982), Polish mathematician, specializing mainly in topology, subsequently professor at Warsaw University.
188.
Melchior Wańkowicz (1892–1974), Polish writer, journalist, and publisher. Best known for his reporting for the Polish Armed Forces in the West during World War II, and for his book on the battle of Monte Cassino, in which those forces participated.
189.
Leon Tadeusz Kozłowski (1892–1944), Polish archaeologist, and politician. Prime Minister of Poland from 1934 to 1935.
190.
Samuel Dickstein (1851–1939), Polish-Jewish mathematician. One of the founders of the Jewish movement Zjednoczenie (Unification), advocating the assimilation of Polish Jews. Considered the preserver of Polish mathematics in Warsaw during the nineteenth-century Russian occupation. Killed by a German bomb at the beginning of World War II. All of his immediate family perished in Nazi concentration camps.
191.
Julian Tuwim (1894–1953), considered one of the greatest of modern Polish poets. In 1919 cofounded the “Skamander” group of Polish experimental poets with Antoni Słonimski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz.
192.
Men paid to dance with women.
193.
Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (1891–1945), Polish poet, known as the Polish Sappho and “queen of lyrical poetry” of interwar Poland.
194.
Pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev (1880–1934), Russian novelist, poet, and literary theorist and critic. Vladimir Nabokov considered his novel Petersburg one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century.
195.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860–1941), Polish pianist, composer, diplomat, and politician. Prime Minister of Poland in 1919.
196.
Well-known Polish strongmen and wrestlers of the interwar period. See Chapter 2
197.
Hungarian lyric soprano. Often performed with Kiepura. Fled to the US with Kiepura to escape Nazism. Born in 1912.
198.
A social and cultural illustrated weekly published in Kraków between 1924 and 1939.
199.
Bernie Witkowski, American band leader. Son of a Polish immigrant to the US. Mixed traditional Polish music with American jazz.
200.
Angela Aranda Arellano (1874–1928), Mexican singer. Daughter of Spanish immigrants to Mexico.
201.
Polish neuroanatomist and psychiatrist. Lived from 1883 to 1937.
202.
Edward Rydz-Śmigły (1886–1941), Marshal of Poland, Polish political figure, painter, and poet. Hero of World War I and the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920. Succeeded Józef Piłsudski as General Inspector of the Polish Armed Forces in 1935 on Piłsudski’s death, but lacked the latter’s authority.
203.
Prince Adam Stefan Sapieha (1867–1951), Polish Roman Catholic cardinal and archbishop of Kraków.
204.
Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski (1881–1942), Polish general, politician, diplomat, physician, and poet. Piłsudski’s aide-de-camp during the Polish-Soviet war.
205.
Frederick Lambart, 10th Earl of Cavan (1865–1946), Field Marshal and Chief of the Imperial General Staff 1922–1926.
206.
The lower and upper houses of the Polish parliament.
207.
An architectural complex dating in part from the ninth century, built and rebuilt over many centuries atop a limestone outcrop on the left bank of the Vistula in Kraków. It includes a royal castle, an armoury, and a cathedral, and is of great historical interest to Poles. Site of royal coronations and interment of distinguished Poles.
208.
Ignacy Mościcki (1867–1946), Polish chemist and politician. President of Poland from 1926 to 1939, he entered into a power-sharing agreement with Rydz-Śmigły in 1935, whereby he would continue as president, with Rydz-Śmigły as de facto leader of Poland. However, Rydz-Śmigły lacked the moral authority of Piłsudski, and the government degenerated into bitter in-fighting between the factions headed by these two and others.
209.
A city in the southeastern part of central Poland, capital of the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship.
210.
Non-Jews.
211.
“young men”
212.
Yiddish for “What is ‘ein-stein’?”
213.
Adam Władysław Doboszyński (1904–1949), Polish politician. One of the leaders of the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe). In 1936 he organized a march on Myślenice, a small shtetl near Kraków. His militia occupied the town, disarmed the police, plundered Jewish stores, and attempted to set fire to the synagogue. He was ultimately arrested and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. This was just one of many anti-Semitic incidents and pogroms of the period, which multiplied in spite of organized Jewish resistance.
214.
The supposed feudal privilege of the lord of the manor to bed his peasants’ brides on the night of their wedding.
215.
See: Adam Doboszyński, Słowo ciężarne (The Pregnant Word), Warszawa, 1932.
216.
Official segregation in the seating of students, introduced in Poland’s universities, beginning with the Lwów Polytechnic in 1935. By 1937 the practise had become conditionally legalized. Under this system Jewish university students were compelled, under threat of expulsion, to sit in designated left-hand side sections of lecture halls.
217.
Polish laws limiting ritual slaughter—forming part of the traditional Jewish religious practice—were passed in 1936, and in final and drastic form in 1939, following the Nazi invasion of Poland.
218.
Stanisław Trzeciak (1873–1944), anti-Semitic Polish priest, and self-proclaimed expert on Jewish lore.
219.
Andrzej Gawroński (1885–1927), Polish orientalist and polyglot. His father was Franciszek Rawita-Gawroński, a Polish historian, writer, and publicist. Andrzej dropped the “Rawita” because it had been used as a pseudonym by his father.
220.
Marek (Mark) Kac (1914–1984), Polish mathematician. Obtained his doctorate from Lwów University. Worked mainly in probability theory. Went to the US in 1938 on a scholarship from the Parnas Foundation. Later held positions at Cornell, Rockefeller University, and the University of Southern California.
221.
That is, functions considered as random variables.
222.
Andre˘ı Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (1903–1987), preeminent Soviet mathematician.
223.
Józef Marcinkiewicz (1910–1940), Polish mathematician. Studied under Antoni Zygmund. Mathematics docent at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno. Murdered by the Soviets in the “Katyń massacre”. (He was in fact murdered in Kharkiv, Ukraine, along with thousands of other members of the Polish educated class—on Stalin’s instructions. The term “Katyń massacre” originally referred only to the massacre by the NKVD at Katyń Forest, near the villages of Katyń and Gnezdovo (about 19 km west of Smolensk, Russia), of Polish army officers from the Kozielsk prisoner-of-war camp in 1940. However, the term “Katyń massacre” subsequently came to refer to the execution by the NKVD of about 22,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia, including about 14,550 prisoners-of-war (mainly Polish army and police officers) arrested in Soviet-occupied Poland, sent to camps chiefly in Kozielsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov, or to Soviet prisons in Kharkiv, Kalinin (Tver) and elsewhere, then shot and buried in mass graves. Soviet officialdom long claimed they were Nazi victims, continuing to deny responsibility for the massacre till 1990.)
224.
A model of diffusion proposed by Paul Ehrenfest to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
225.
Functions similar to that invented by Peano, which maps a line segment continuously onto the unit square. Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), Italian mathematician and logician. One of the founders of set theory.
226.
Drawings or photographs in two off-set colors which when viewed through glasses each lens of which filters out one of the two colors, trick the brain into perceiving a stereoscopic, that is, three-dimensional, image.
227.
Franciszek Otto (1904–2000), Polish mathematician. Following World War II adjunct professor of descriptive geometry at Gdańsk Polytechnic. His brother Edward was also a professor of descriptive geometry.
228.
Jan Czekanowski (1882–1965), Polish anthropologist, statistician, and linguist. Introduced numerical taxonomy into comparative linguistics. In 1913 he developed a still much-used index of similarity between two samples of some kind of objects.
229.
Stanisław Kulczyński (1895–1975), Polish botanist and politician. Rector of Lwów University from 1936 to 1938, when he resigned in protest at the “Ghetto Law”. A member of the “Polish Secret State” during World War II, he participated in the well-known Polish underground education project. After the war first Rector (1945–1951) of the University and Polytechnic in Wrocław. Deputy chairman of the Polish Council of State 1956–1969.
230.
Polish physicist. Father of modern thermochemistry. Lived from 1881 to 1968.
231.
In 1938.
232.
This occurred in the town of Przytyk in east-central Poland when local peasants, incited by extremist politicians of the right-wing National Democratic Party, attacked Jewish stores in March 1936. The Jewish community fought back, but in the trials following the restoration of order, Jewish participants in the disturbances were unfairly penalized. As a result there was a significant increase in Jewish emigration from Poland at that time.
233.
Maksymilian Tytus Huber (1872–1950), Polish expert in mechanical engineering.
234.
Ignacy Mościcki—see above.
235.
A law permitting the detention of those “whose activities give reason to believe that they threaten public security, peace, or order” in the prison at Bereza Kartuska in Polesie Province (now in Belarus). The law was in force from 1934 to 1939, and was passed when Kozłowski was both Prime Minister and acting Minister of the Interior.
236.
Kazimierz Fajans (1887–1975), Polish-American physical chemist. Pioneer in the field of radioactivity. Established, together with the English radiochemist Frederick Soddy, the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements, a major discovery of physical chemistry.
237.
Anti-Semitic laws passed in Nazi Germany at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi party.
238.
Murdered by Germans in 1944.
239.
Wilhelm Conrad R¨ontgen (1845–1923), German physicist. Produced and detected the short-wave electromagnetic radiation known today as X-rays in 1895, for which he received the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901.
240.
Władysław Hetper (1909–1940), Polish mathematician. Studied logic in Kraków, obtained his doctorate in Lwów, and habilitated just before World War II broke out. Was arrested by the Soviets and perished in the Gulag.
241.
Jan Herzberg (1908–1941?), Polish logician. Educated in Kraków, he came to Lwów in 1938. Went missing in June 1941.
242.
The study of the Semitic languages and the literatures and history of the Semitic peoples.
243.
Appointed first chairman of the Lwów Judenrat when the Germans took Lwów in 1941, but then shot for refusing to cooperate with the Nazis.
244.
Though recommended by Steinhaus, Kac was not awarded the Parnas scholarship on his first try in 1937. This was perhaps fortunate since had he gotten it in 1937, he would most likely have returned to Poland in 1938. In 1939 there was, for obvious reasons, no question of returning.
245.
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832–1920), German doctor, physiologist, psychologist, and philosopher. A founding figure of modern psychology.
246.
Both Krzemieniec and Wiśniowiec are today in western Ukraine.
247.
By Tadeusz Czacki (1765–1813), Polish historian, pedagogue, and numismatist. Inspector of schools for the province of Volhynia, Podolia, and Ukraine. Worked for the emancipation of Jews in Poland.
248.
Adam Ignacy Koc (1891–1969), Polish politician, journalist, and soldier.
249.
An ancient forest straddling the present-day border between Belarus and Poland. A remnant of the immense primeval forest that once spread across the European plain.
250.
Tadeusz Stefan Zieliński (1859–1944), prominent Polish classical philologist and historian. Translated several ancient Greek authors into Polish and Russian. Professor at the University of St. Petersburg from 1890 to 1920, then at Warsaw University from 1920 to 1939.
251.
Polish literary theorist, Germanist, philosopher, and cultural historian. Lived from 1886 to 1943, when he perished in Auschwitz.
252.
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), great German poet and essayist of Jewish background. Converted to protestantism in 1825. His radical political views led to many of his works’ being banned in Germany, and he spent the last 25 years of his life in Paris.
253.
Another source maintains that in a Grade Three textbook prepared by Łempicki and Gustaw Elgert and published by the publishing house Książnica Atlas in 1936, the poem in question is attributed to Heinrich Heine.
254.
“folk song”
255.
“Truth is a friend, but Goebbels is a greater friend”, parodying Aristotle’s “Plato is dear, but truth is dearer.”
256.
Stanisław Saks (1897–1942), Polish mathematician. Member of the “Scottish Caf´e” in Lwów. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, he joined the Polish resistance. Wrote an extensive monograph Theory of the Integral, and co-authored Analytic Functions with Antoni Zygmund. Executed by the Gestapo in 1942.
257.
The agreement of September 29, 1938, signed by Germany, Britain, France, and Italy, ceding to Germany the region of western Czechoslovakia considered in Germany as part of the Sudetenland. This was one of several attempts at appeasement of Hitler by Britain and France prior to World War II.
258.
Which had passed sanctions against Italy for the invasion of Ethiopia.
259.
An exclusive brand of Swiss watches, produced by Pamm Fr`eres Ltd., Geneva.
260.
Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970), German economist, banker, and liberal politician. Served in the Weimar Republic. Became a supporter of Hitler and the Nazi Party, and helped implement Hitler’s policies of redevelopment, reindustrialization, and rearmament. Forced out of the government in 1938 through disagreements with Hitler and other prominent Nazis, he became a fringe member of German resistance to Hitler.
261.
“O Man, watch outPower is stupidEven more stupid than Schacht had thought.”
262.
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), German theoretical physicist. Made fundamental contributions to quantum theory. Famous for his “uncertainty principle.” Nobel laureate in 1932.
263.
He had fled from the University of Kiel to Copenhagen in 1933 to escape the Nazis, and taught there and then in Sweden, before emigrating to the US in 1939.
264.
By Steinhaus.
265.
Harald Cram´er (1893–1985), Swedish mathematician, specializing in mathematical statistics and probabilistic number theory.
266.
Paul Pierre L´evy (1886–1971), eminent French probabilist. Professor of Analysis at the ´Ecole Polytechnique from 1920 to 1959, with a gap during World War II dating from his dismissal in 1940 in accordance with the Vichy Statute on Jews.
267.
Eberhard Hopf (1902–1983), Austrian-American mathematician and astronomer. Made significant contributions to the fields of partial differential equations, integral equations, fluid mechanics, and differential geometry.
268.
Edward Lewis Dodd (1875–1943), American mathematician and statistician at the University of Texas at Austin.
269.
Maurice Fr´echet (1878–1973), eminent French mathematician. Made major contributions to topology, probability, statistics, and functional analysis.
270.
Wolfgang D¨oblin (known in France as Vincent Doblin) (1915–1940), German-French mathematician. Elected to the French Academy of Sciences at the age of 21. Took his own life when his company was faced with imminent capture by the Germans in 1940. A notebook of his, which remained unopened and forgotten till the year 2000, showed that his work on Markov processes had been far in advance of its time.
271.
Henri Fehr (1870–1954), professor of algebra and higher geometry at the University of Geneva.
272.
George Pólya (1887–1985), eminent Hungarian mathematician. Professor at ETH Z¨urich from 1914 to 1940, and thereafter at Stanford. Contributed to many areas of mathematics. Wrote very popular and influential books on what might be called “mathematics education.”
273.
Tytus Komarnicki (1896–1967), Polish diplomat and historian.
274.
Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski (1885–1962), Polish physician, general, and politician. In 1936 became Poland’s last prime minister before the outbreak of World War II.
275.
That is, 24/7, as they now say. This has to do with the well-known difficulty in storing electricity efficiently.
276.
Developed from the discovery in 1885 by Galileo Ferraris of Turin that two out-of-phase AC fields can make a solid armature rotate.
277.
Swiss Electricity Consortium.
278.
Jerzy Spława-Neyman (1894–1981), prominent Polish-American mathematician and statistician. Born in tsarist Russia to a family of Polish background, he was repatriated to Poland in 1921 after the Polish-Soviet War. In 1924 spent some months in London working with Egon Pearson. In 1934 he left Poland again for an extended visit abroad, chiefly in Britain, and in 1938 obtained a position in Berkeley, where he remained for the rest of his life. Introduced the “confidence interval” in a 1937 paper.
279.
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888–1970), Indian physicist. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his discovery of “Raman scattering” of light rays.
280.
This may have been suggested by the incident mentioned earlier in connection with the Przytyk pogrom.
281.
Maurycy Bloch (also called variously Morcio and Moryś) (1917–1995), scion of a wealthy Polish family, immigrated to the US just prior to World War II, where he set up in business.
282.
A city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship, on Gdańsk Bay. An important Polish seaport.
283.
One of the earliest breeds of horse developed in the US. Tracing back to the stallion “Figure”, later named after his best-known owner Justin Morgan (1747–1798), the breed excels in many disciplines.
284.
The brand name of a toothpaste first marketed in 1907.
285.
The English version was entitled Mathematical Snapshots.
286.
That is, the problem of determining the location of an object inside a patient’s body.
287.
One of the largest parks in Lwów.
288.
H. Steinhaus, “Sur la localisation d’objets au moyen des rayons X”, Comptes Rendus des S´eances de l’Acad´emie des Sciences, Paris 206 (1938), pp. 1473–1475.
289.
Księga Pamiątkowa 70-lecia Gimnazjum w Jaśle (1868–1938).
290.
Collections of Lebesgue’s lectures, the first of which is titled Le¸cons sur l’int´egration et la recherche des fonctions primitives.
291.
Marian Auerbach (1882–1941), Polish classical philologist. Murdered by the Gestapo in Lwów.
292.
On May 26, 1938, at the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów, a special place of interment memorializing those Poles and their allies who died in Lwów during the Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Soviet War of 1918–1920, a monument to the French participants in the defence was unveiled. The ceremony was attended by the Polish Marshal Rydz-Śmigły and Major-General F´elix-Joseph Musse, French military attach´e to Poland.
293.
That is, they can only be superimposed by means of a transformation involving a reflection.
294.
A prize in the mathematical and physical sciences announced by the engineer N. Malaxa of Bucharest, and awarded for the first time in 1938.
295.
Jean Leray (1906–1998), French mathematician. Worked in partial differential equations and algebraic topology. The “Leray spectral sequence” was seminal to the development of spectral sequences and sheaves. Collaborated with Schauder from 1932 to 1935.
296.
A popular spa. Before World War II it was run by the Lwów Medical Association. Now Morshyn, in western Ukraine.
297.
A physician from Lwów.
298.
Stanisław Rouppert (1887–1945), head of the health service of the Polish armed forces from 1926 to 1939.
299.
Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), Polish medical doctor and biologist. Developed in the 1930s the concept of “thought collectives” as a means of explaining how accepted scientific ideas change over time. (Compare Thomas Kuhn’s later notion of a “paradigm shift”, Foucault’s “episteme”, and Richard Dawkins’ concept of a “meme”.)
300.
White blood cells, the cells of the immune system, involved in defending the body against infectious disease and foreign materials. They come in five different types (including lymphocytes and monocytes), all derived from a multipotent cell in the bone marrow called the hematopoietic stem cell.
301.
At between 5000 and 7000 per cubic millimeter.
302.
Bolesław Prus (born Aleksander Głowacki) (1847–1912), distinguished figure of Polish positivism, novelist, journalist, and short-story writer. Zygmunt Nowakowski (born Zygmunt Tempka) (1891–1963), Polish writer and actor. Henryk Zbierzchowski (pseudonym Nemo) (1881–1942), Polish writer, poet, and playwright, connected with Lwów.
303.
Adolf Joszt (1889–1957), Polish chemist, professor at the Lwów Polytechnic, and Rector from 1936 to 1938.
304.
A line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery and machine-gun posts, and other defenses along France’s borders with Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany and Italy.
305.
A resort town in the Eastern Carpathians on the river Prut. Till 1939 in Poland, now in western Ukraine.
306.
A place close to Jaremcze noted for its rocky outcrops.
307.
Field Marshal William Edmund Ironside, First Baron Ironside (1880–1959), British army officer. Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the first year of World War II. In May 1940 transferred to the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces.
308.
Józef Prutkowski (theatrical pseudonym Nacht) (1915–1981), Polish actor and writer.
309.
Joseph Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), Anglo-French writer and historian.
310.
This poem is actually not by Belloc but by Jocelyn Henry Clive “Harry” Graham (1874–1936), English lyricist for operettas and musical comedies and writer of humorous verse. The poem was first published in Punch in 1909.
311.
Code for the altitude.
312.
Stanisław Stempowski (1870–1952), Polish-Ukrainian writer and politician. Prior to World War II he was Grand Master of the Polish Freemasons.
313.
Now in western Ukraine.
314.
A village now in western Ukraine.
315.
Formerly a mountain resort village in southeastern Poland.
316.
Karol Kossak (1896–1975), Polish painter and illustrator. Wojciech Kossak (1857–1942), the most famous of a celebrated family of Polish painters.
317.
Stanisław Rejchan (1858–1919), Polish painter, illustrator, and pedagogue.
318.
A tributary of the Vistula in south-eastern Poland. This occupation had been agreed upon in the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact.
319.
Towns in central Poland.
320.
Jakub Rothfeld-Rostowski (1884–1971).
321.
The Two Grenadiers, written by Heinrich Heine in 1822, about two grenadiers who on their way home to France from capture in Russia voice their sorrow at the defeat of France and the fall of Napoleon.
322.
That is, before it was closed by the Soviets in late September 1939.
323.
Now called Nadvirna, in western Ukraine.
324.
“Council”
325.
Formerly a suburb of Lwów, incorporated into the town in 1930.

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Wroclaw, Poland
Hugo Steinhaus

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Hugo Steinhaus
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Dept. Mathematics & Statistics, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Robert G. Burns
Wrocław, Poland
Irena Szymaniec
The Hugo Steinhaus Center, Wrocław University of Technology (WUT), Wrocław, Poland
Aleksander Weron

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Steinhaus, H. (2015). In the University Town Lwów. 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_7

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