Timeline of Polish science and technology


Education has been of prime interest to Poland's rulers since the early 12th century. The catalog of the library of the Cathedral Chapter in Kraków dating from 1110 shows that Polish scholars already then had access to western European literature. In 1364, King Casimir III the Great founded the Cracow Academy, which would become one of the great universities of Europe. The Polish people have made considerable contributions in the fields of science, technology and mathematics. The list of famous scientists in Poland begins in earnest with the polymath, astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus, who formulated the heliocentric theory and sparked the European Scientific Revolution.
In 1773, King Stanisław August Poniatowski established the Commission of National Education, the world's first ministry of education.
After the third partition of Poland, in 1795, no Polish state existed. The 19th and 20th centuries saw many Polish scientists working abroad. One of them was Maria Skłodowska-Curie, a physicist and chemist living in France. Another noteworthy one was Ignacy Domeyko, a geologist and mineralogist who worked in Chile.
In the first half of the 20th century, Poland was a flourishing center of mathematics. Outstanding Polish mathematicians formed the Lwów School of Mathematics and Warsaw School of Mathematics. The events of World War II pushed many of them into exile. Such was the case of Benoît Mandelbrot, whose family left Poland when he was still a child. An alumnus of the Warsaw School of Mathematics was Antoni Zygmund, one of the shapers of 20th-century mathematical analysis. According to NASA, Polish scientists were among the pioneers of rocketry.
Today Poland has over 100 institutions of post-secondary education—technical, medical, economic, as well as 500 universities—which are located in most major cities such as Gdańsk, Kraków, Lublin, Łódź, Poznań, Rzeszów, Toruń, Warsaw and Wrocław. They employ over 61,000 scientists and scholars. Another 300 research and development institutes are home to some 10,000 researchers. There are, in addition, a number of smaller laboratories. All together, these institutions support some 91,000 scientists and scholars.

Timeline

From 2001

1951–2000

1901–1950

1851–1900

1801–1850

1701–1800

1601–1700

  • Adam Adamandy Kochański, Polish mathematician, physicist and clockmaker found an approximation of π today called the Kochański's Approximation. He also suggested replacing the clock's pendulum with a spring, constructed a clock with a magnetic pendulum, and was the author of the world's first systematic paper on the construction of clocks.
  • Johannes Hevelius was an astronomer who published the earliest exact maps of the moon and the most complete star catalog of his time, containing 1,564 stars. In 1641 he built an observatory in his house; he is known as "the founder of lunar topography".
  • Jan Brożek was the most prominent 17th-century Polish mathematician. Following his death, his collection of Nicolaus Copernicus' letters and documents, which he had borrowed 40 years earlier with the intent of writing a biography of Copernicus, was lost.
  • Kazimierz Siemienowicz, Polish–Lithuanian general of artillery, gunsmith, military engineer, and pioneer of rocketry who developed the concept of a multistage rocket.
  • King of Poland, John II Casimir, founded the University of Lviv.
  • Michał Boym, Polish Jesuit missionary to China, scientist and explorer; he is notable as one of the first westerners to travel within the Chinese mainland, and the author of numerous works on Asian fauna, flora and geography. He was the first in Europe to describe Korea as a peninsula, as until then it was believed to be an island, and the first in Europe to establish the factual location of a number of Chinese cities and the Great Wall of China.
  • Adam Freytag, mathematician and military engineer, wrote Architectura militaris nova et aucta, the first manual of bastion fortifications of the so-called Old Dutch system.
  • Krzysztof Arciszewski, Polish–Lithuanian nobleman, military officer, engineer, and ethnographer. Arciszewski also served as a general of artillery for the Netherlands and Poland
  • Adam Wybe, Dutch-born inventor, constructed the world's first aerial lift in Gdańsk in 1644.
  • Jan Jonston, Polish scholar and physician of Scottish descent; author of Thautomatographia naturalis and Idea universae medicinae practicae
  • Michał Sędziwój, Polish alchemist, philosopher, and medical doctor; a pioneer of chemistry, he developed ways of purification and creation of various acids, metals and other chemical compounds; he discovered that air is not a single substance and contains a life-giving substance-later called oxygen 170 years before similar discoveries by Scheele and Priestley; he correctly identified this 'food of life' with the gas given off by heating nitre ; this substance, the 'central nitre', had a central position in Sendivogius' schema of the universe.

1501–1600

Middle Ages