Stanisław Domoradzki

In the article, we present operation of the Commission for the History of Mathematics appointed by the Main Board of the Polish Mathematical Society. From 1997 to 2000, the Committee was continuously chaired by Dr. Zofia Pawlikowska-Brożek, PhD in mathematics at the Jagiellonian University in the field of History of Mathematics, a student of an outstanding mathematician and respected teacher, Professor Dr hab. Zdzisław Opial (1930–1974).

Based on the documents, that the author received from the Chair of the Commission, we present how the activities of the Commission contributed to initiation of research on the history of mathematics, and to e creation of a professional community of historians of mathematics in Poland.

The history of mathematics has been a discipline well known in Kraków since the times of Ludwik A. Birkenmajer (1855–1929). His activities were successfully continued by Z. Opial. The issues of Kraków center for history of mathematics were presented by Domoradzki 2020; and Kokowski 2020, among others.

An important inspiration for the activities of the Committee were initiatives undertaken by the Department of History of Science, Education, and Technology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in agreement with the Committee of the History of Science and Technology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in which the Chairwoman of the Committee actively participated.

The materials presented in the work cover also the period before the establishment of the Commission for the History of Mathematics.

In the article we present the report from the memorial session of prof. Andrzej Pelczar (1937–2010), organized online on June 2, 2020 by the Board of the Krakow Branch of the Polish Mathematical Society.

We familiarize the reader with the profile of A. Pelczar (1937–2010) and some of his achievements recalled during the session. We invoke also fragments of statements made by participants of the session.

In this study, we present profiles of some distinguished graduates in mathematics of the Jagiellonian University from the years 1918‒1925. We discuss their professional paths and scholarly achievements, instances of scientific collaboration, connections with other academic centers in Poland and worldwide, involvement in mathematical education and teacher training, as well as their later roles in Polish scientific and academic life. We also try to understand in what way they were shaped by their studies and how much of Kraków scientific traditions they continued. We find strong support for the claim that there was a distinct, diverse and deep mathematical stream in Kraków between the wars, rooted in classical disciplines such as differential equations and geometry, but also open to new trends in mathematics.

In this study, we continue presenting profiles of some distinguished graduates in mathematics of the Jagiellonian University. We consider the years 1926‒1939, after the ministerial reform which allowed the students to graduate with a master’s degree. We also give a list of master’s theses in mathematics.

In the article, we will show the main important results of the international research project The impact of WWI on the formation and transformation of the scientific life of the mathematical community. It was supported by the Czech Science Foundation for the years 2018–2020 and brought together ten scientists from five countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, USA, and Ukraine) and used the collaboration with historians of mathematics and mathematicians from many other European countries. We will discuss our motivation for the creation of the project, our methodological and professional preparations which profited from the international composition of the team and its longtime collaborations, profound specializations and experiences of the team members, and their deep and long-term studies of many archival sources and basic published works. We will present our choice of the general research trends, our definition of the scientific questions, and our determination of the main topics of our studies. We will describe our most important results (books, articles, visiting lectures, presentations at national and international conferences, seminars and book fairs, exhibitions, popularizations of the results between students, teachers, mathematicians, historians of sciences, and people who love mathematics and its history). We will analyze the new benefit that the project created for the future, for example, good platforms for future international research and cooperation, the discovery of many new interesting research questions, problems, and plans.

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The article familiarizes the readers with the stay of A. Pelczar (1937–2010) in France and his encounters with mathematicians working and staying in the prestigious Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette (IHÉS) and Université Paris XI (Faculté des Sciences d’Orsay). The future founder of the Kraków school of dynamical systems had an opportunity to meet the following mathematicians, among others: M. Artin, A. Grothendieck, N. Kuiper, B. Malgrange, J. Mather, P. Deligne, R. Thom, Ch. Zeeman.

The article was written thanks to the memories of Jacek Bochnak, the companion of Pelczar in France, nowadays a renowned professor of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

This article is a partial report of research on mathematical education at the Jagiellonian University in the period 1860‒1945. We give a description of the selected lectures: Calculus of Probability by Michał Karliński, Analytic Geometry by Franciszek Mertens, Marian Baraniecki’s lectures, Higher seminar (Weierstrass preparation theorem) by Kazimierz Żorawski, Principles of Set theory by Zaremba and Analytic function and Number theory by Jan Sleszyński. Moreover, short biographical notes of professors of mathematics of the Jagiellonian University Michał Karliński, Franciszek Mertens, Marian Baraniecki, Stanisław Kępiński, Kazimierz Żorawski, Stanisław Zaremba and Jan Sleszyński ‒ are given.

The article highlights certain aspects of the set theory and topology in Puzyna’s work Theory of analytic functions (1899, 1900). In particular, the following notions are considered: derivative of a set, cardinality, connectedness, accumulation point, surface, genus of surface.

We provide one of the first surveys of results in the area of topology by representatives of the Lvov School of mathematics and mathematicians related to the University of Lvov. Viewed together, these results show the importance of this school in the creation of topology.

In the second part of our article we continue presentation of individual fates of Polish mathematicians (in a broad sense) and the formation of modern Polish mathematical community against the background of the events of World War I. In particular we focus on the situations of Polish mathematicians in the Russian Empire (including those affiliatedwith the University of Warsaw, reactivated by Germans, and the Warsaw Polytechnics, founded already by Russians) and other countries.

In this article we present diverse experiences of Polish mathematicians (in a broad sense) who during World War I fought for freedom of their homeland or conducted their research and teaching in difficult wartime circumstances. We discuss not only individual fates, but also organizational efforts of many kinds (teaching at the academic level outside traditional institutions, Polish scientific societies, publishing activities) in order to illustrate the formation of modern Polish mathematical community.

In Part I we focus on mathematicians affiliated with the existing Polish institutions of higher education: Universities in Lwów in Kraków and the Polytechnical School in Lwów, within the Austro-Hungarian empire.

In the paper, we discuss the exposition of material on the theory of surfaces in J. Puzyna’s monograph “Teorya funkcyj analitycznych” [Theory of Analytic functions] (published at the turn of XIX and XX centuries) which is necessary for consideration of the Riemann surfaces of analytic functions. Though the monograph contains elements of the set theory, the author preferred a descriptive exposition.