Mathematical Community of the General Faculty

at the Lwów Polytechnics (1927−1934)

Margaret Stawiska-Friedland (American Mathematical Society, USA)

In 1921, a General Faculty was established in the Lwów Polytechnics by the decree of the Minister of Religious Denominations and Public Education. Its main aim was educating teachers, experimental technicians and decorative artists. Accordingly, the students were divided into three groups: mathematics, physics and chemistry, and drawing and painting. But the scientific aspects of their education were much more profound than the utilitarian goal would suggest, thanks to many prominent scholars active in the Faculty.

In this talk we will present activities and achievements of some mathematicians connected with the General Faculty. The creation of the Faculty happened due to the efforts of Kazimierz Bartel, a descriptive geometer and a politician, a multiple prime minister of the Republic of Poland. However, Bartel was not involved in day-to-day activities of the Faculty. In 1927 the 3rd Chair of Mathematics at the Polytechnics was given to a brilliant mathematician from Warsaw, Kazimierz Kuratowski, a specialist in set theory and topology. Kuratowski also served as a dean of the General Faculty. The deputy dean was Włodzimierz Sto Ŝek, a mathematician with PhD from Jagiellonian University working in potential theory. Prominent representatives of the Lwów School of Mathematics taught at the Faculty: Antoni Łomnicki, Stanisław Ruziewicz, Stefan Banach, Stefan Kaczmarz, Zbigniew Łomnicki and Władysław Orlicz. So did mathematicians who were not members of the School in the strict sense: Władysław Nikliborc, Adam Maksymowicz and Antoni Plamitzer. We will address the question of how their own mathematical interests corresponded with the educational aim of the Faculty.

The Faculty produced a few distinguished graduates in pure mathematics, most notably Stanisław Ulam, and also Edward Otto and Tadeusz Posament. All of them were students of Kuratowski and co-authored mathematical publications with him. We will discuss briefly their work.

Finally, we will talk about other scholars who taught at the Faculty (not necessarily in the group of mathematics) with achievements on the borderlines of mathematics. We will focus particularly on the astronomer Lucjan Grabowski, the theoretical physicist Wojciech Rubinowicz and the philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Among the graduates we will also mention the theoretical physicist Jan Blaton.