Lwów School of Mathematics

The Lwów school of mathematics was a group of Polish mathematicians who worked in the interwar period in Lwów, Poland. The mathematicians often met at the famous Scottish Café to discuss mathematical problems, and published in the journal Studia Mathematica, founded in 1929. The school was renowned for its productivity and its extensive contributions to subjects such as point-set topology, set theory and functional analysis.

Members

Notable members of the Lwów school of mathematics included:

The biographies and contributions of these mathematicians were documented in 1980 by their contemporary, Kazimierz Kuratowski in his book A Half Century of Polish Mathematics: Remembrances and Reflections.

The end of the school

Many of the mathematicians, especially those of Jewish background, fled in 1941 when it became clear that the USSR would be invaded by Germany. Few of the mathematicians survived World War II, but after the war a group including some of the original community carried on their work in western Poland's Wrocław, the successor city to prewar Lwów; see Polish population transfers. A number of the prewar mathematicians, prominent among them Stanisław Ulam, became famous for work done in the United States.