ProofWiki:Mathematicians/Sorted By Nation/Poland

For more comprehensive information on the lives and works of mathematicians through the ages, see the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, created by John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson.

"The army of those who have made at least one definite contribution to mathematics as we know it soon becomes a mob as we look back over history; 6,000 or 8,000 names press forward for some word from us to preserve them from oblivion, and once the bolder leaders have been recognised it becomes largely a matter of arbitrary, illogical legislation to judge who of the clamouring multitude shall be permitted to survive and who be condemned to be forgotten."

Poland

Wacław Sierpiński

1882 – 1969

Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński was a Polish mathematician who made considerable contributions to the fields of set theory, number theory and topology, among others.

Most famous for the Sierpiński triangle.
show full page

Zygmunt Janiszewski

1888 – 1920

Polish mathematician whose work was mainly in topology.

Co-founded the journal Fundamenta Mathematicae but died of influenza before its first issue.
show full page

Stefan Banach

1892 – 1945

Polish mathematician who founded the modern field of functional analysis.

Most famous for his collaborative paper with Alfred Tarski in 1924, in which the Banach-Tarski Paradox was raised. This demonstrated that a contra-intuitive truth could be deduced from the ZFC axioms of set theory, specifically, by assuming the truth of the Axiom of Choice. Impassioned controversy rages to this day.
show full page

Kazimierz Kuratowski

1896 – 1980

Sometimes Westernised as Casimir.

Polish mathematician whose work was mainly in topology and metric spaces.

Pioneered, with Alfred Tarski and Wacław Sierpiński, the theory of Polish spaces.
show full page

Antoni Szczepan Zygmund

1900 – 1992

Polish-born American mathematician famous for his work on trigonometrical series.
show full page

Alfred Tarski

1902 – 1983

Name at birth: Alfred Teitelbaum.

Polish mathematician who worked in several fields of mathematics, in particular logic.

Most famous for the Banach-Tarski Paradox (with Stefan Banach) in 1924.
show full page

Andrzej Mostowski

1913 – 1975

Polish mathematician, best known for the Mostowski Collapse Lemma.
show full page

Jerzy Łoś

1920 – 1998

Polish mathematician, best known for his work on ultraproducts, in particular for Łoś's Theorem.
show full page