2.1 The Lwów School

MacTutor describes the Lwów School as "a group of about a dozen mathematicians working in functional analysis, real functions and probability theory" [1]. People who met at the Scottish Café include Banach, Steinhaus, Ulam, Mazur, Kac, Schauder and Kaczmarz, and Władysław Orlicz himself [2].

The school has a founding story. In 1916 Steinhaus met Banach in the Planty gardens in Kraków, after he "overheard the words 'Lebesgue measure'" [3]. Banach's 1920 dissertation "defined axiomatically what today is called a Banach space", and in 1932 his Théorie des opérations linéaires appeared, a French version of his 1931 Polish book [4]. In 1929 Banach and Steinhaus founded the journal Studia Mathematica [3, 4].

Ulam's teacher Kuratowski taught at the Lwów Polytechnic from 1927 and moved to the University of Warsaw in 1934 [5]. He had left Lwów before the mathematicians began writing down the problems in the Scottish Book, so he belongs to the teachers of this story, not to the café.

Turn the cards below to meet seven of the people. Think about what you remember, then reveal the back.

Sources

1. MacTutor, "Stanisław Mazur", https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Mazur/
2. MacTutor, "Władysław Orlicz", https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Orlicz/
3. MacTutor, "Hugo Steinhaus", https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Steinhaus/
4. MacTutor, "Stefan Banach", https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Banach/
5. MacTutor, "Kazimierz Kuratowski", https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kuratowski/