The article outlines the fifth phase of the development of the journal Studia Historiae Scientiarum (previous name Prace Komisji Historii Nauki PAU / Proceedings of the PAU Commission on the History of Science). A new journal website has been created. The information has been provided on the journal indexing and its availability in libraries around the world, the number of foreign authors, and the number of journal reviewers.

The article outlines the fifth phase of the development of the journal Studia Historiae Scientiarum (previous name Prace Komisji Historii Nauki PAU / Proceedings of the PAU Commission on the History of Science). A new journal website has been created. The information has been provided on the journal indexing and its availability in libraries around the world, the number of foreign authors, and the number of journal reviewers.

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.

Objective: During the interwar period, the healthcare system in Europe experienced a dramatic transformation. It was perceived that preventive medicine was no less important than curative medicine. Moreover, without proper prevention of the so-called social diseases, all later therapeutic measures were expensive and ineffective. The former battle against the consequences was replaced by measures targeting the causes. The fight against social diseases involved a state-owned strategy and a broad arsenal of measures. The University’s scholars also took part in this

process. Our study revealed that the significance of the disease prevention in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Stephen Bathory was well understood. Moreover, the treatment was not segregated from hygiene as strictly as it is today. Many hygienists as well as clinicians contributed to the development of preventive mechanisms. The broad specialization of doctors enabled them to see not only biomedical, but also social and economic aspects of a disease. Hygienists and doctors encouraged cooperation and coordination of their activities with the central and local authorities as well as education of the local population.

The progress of medical science in Europe and the World, as well as the Soviet ideology in Eastern Europe distracted doctors from the search for the etiology of social illness. Biomedical treatment had become much more effective, and the development of social hygiene research in Eastern Europe had experienced stagnation. For ideological reasons the disease etiology in the Soviet bloc could not be associated with social factors. Social hygiene in the Soviet Union was highly politicized; it could only be interpreted in a frame of Soviet models. The healthcare system that had been created in the Soviet Union was named as the best in the world. The actual medical statistics were concealed from the public, since their logical interpretation could reveal the social causes of illnesses and the disadvantages of the soviet system.

Sometimes we must return to basic ideas to improve current public health mechanisms. It is worth reconsidering fundamental questions, i.e. what public health is and how to achieve it. The breadth of the approach of the interwar Vilnius hygienists and doctors, the sensitivity to the social origins of diseases and persistence in combating them by all possible means could serve as an example for today’s doctors. At that time, hygienists approached the idea that the highest goal of prevention was to create a healthy environment, healthy living and working conditions. Although today we live in a much safer environment than those individuals did, new threats are emerging because of changing technology and lifestyle. The broad approach of physicians remains equally important in order not only to combat individual precedents, but also to overcome the preconditions for emerging precedents. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to reveal the theoretical patterns of hygiene and public health established by the hygienists of the Vilnius Hygiene Department as well as the attempts to apply them in practice.

Methods: The study was conducted by analyzing the primary and secondary historical sources using the comparative method. A lot of data from the Lietuvos Centrinis Valstybės Archyvas (Lithuanian Central State Archives) that had been used in this research were published for the first time. According to the original archival data, an analysis of the scientific publications of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Stephen Bathory was made to find out the priorities of the research carried out at that time.

Conclusions: The complicated economic conditions, the lack of support from the local and central government as well as the imperfections in health legislation of that time hindered the full implementation of the hygienist strategies of the University of Stephen Bathory. However, the activities of the Department of Hygiene of Stephen Bathory University had a significant impact on the development of hygiene science as well as medical practice in the Vilnius region during the Interwar period (1919–1939).

The article discusses the issues of implementation of important achievements in the field of metallurgy (including armored weapons, fortifications and the navy), under the supervision of prof. Jan Czochralski, who played an important role in the development of the armed forces of the Second Polish Republic.

On September 15th 1922, a young Jesuit, Father S. Bednarski, enrolled at the Jagiellonian University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, with specialization in modern history, history of culture and history of art. One of his college professors was a well-known historian, Prof. Stanisław Kot.

This article provides a brief history of the English Department at the Jagiellonian University from 1945 to 1952. It presents the members of the staff and discusses their background and responsibilities as well as problems they faced in the new post-war reality. After the death of Prof. Roman Dyboski, the founder and first Head of the Department, and the arrest of his successor, Prof. Władysław Tarnawski, formerly affiliated with the University of Lvov, the staff were mainly of junior academic ranks, with no involvement in any serious research. Despite that and despite a perennial shortage of space and problems with logistics, the number of students enrolling in the English studies programme would increase each year making the Department grow in size and scope. Thanks to the help of the New York Kosciuszko Foundation, the Department received a collection of several thousands of books, a few young American grantees of the Foundation joined the teaching staff, and some of the outstanding academics and students (e.g. Przemysław Mroczkowski and Alfred Reszkiewicz) obtained funding support to study or conduct research abroad. For ideological reasons, however, Poland’s authorities closed the programme, which ultimately led to the closure of the Department in 1952. 

Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research of Polish Academy of Sciences celebrated its 50th anniversary in November 2016. The paper presents the history of the Institute going backward to the history of other ten scientific institutions from which the Institute was finally founded in 1966. It shows the efforts of Prof. Roman Ingarden and Prof. Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski to establish a powerful center of physics and physico-chemistry of solid state in Wrocław.

Between the World Wars, a robust research community emerged in the nascent discipline of mathematical logic in Warsaw. Logic in Warsaw grew out of overlapping imperial legacies, launched mainly by Polish-speaking scholars who had trained in Habsburg universities and had come during the First World War to the University of Warsaw, an institution controlled until recently by Russia and reconstructed as Polish under the auspices of German occupation. The intellectuals who formed the Warsaw School of Logic embraced a patriotic Polish identity. Competitive nationalist attitudes were common among interwar scientists – a stance historians have called “Olympic internationalism,” in which nationalism and internationalism interacted as complementary rather than conflicting impulses.

One of the School’s leaders, Jan Łukasiewicz, developed a system of notation that he promoted as a universal tool for logical research and communication. A number of his compatriots embraced it, but few logicians outside Poland did; Łukasiewicz’s notation thus inadvertently served as a distinctively national vehicle for his and his colleagues’ output. What he had intended as his most universally applicable invention became instead a respected but provincialized way of writing. Łukasiewicz’s system later spread in an unanticipated form, when postwar computer scientists found aspects of its design practical for working under the specific constraints of machinery; they developed a modified version for programming called “Reverse Polish Notation” (RPN). RPN attained a measure of international currency that Polish notation in logic never had, enjoying a global career in a different discipline outside its namesake country. The ways in which versions of the notation spread, and remained or did not remain “Polish” as they traveled, depended on how readers (whether in mathematical logic or computer science) chose to read it; the production of a nationalized science was inseparable from its international reception.

This article analyses strategies used by geographers of Central and Eastern Europe, foremost Poland, to improve their international position, in the interwar. The boycott of Germany and its former allies almost until mid-1930s was a challenge to this group and it gradually hindered its development. The most original attempt at overcoming the threat of marginalization were congresses of Slavic geographers organized from 1924. The greatest success, however, came with the 1934 Warsaw congress of the Geographical Union, which was also the occasion for German geographers to fully return to international scholarly exchange.

On October 11, 1745, a German scientist Ewald Georg (Jürgen) Kleist in Cammin in Pommern (today Kamień Pomorski) discovered both the phenomenon of storing electricity in a glass vessel with water, and a new device – an electric capacitor. Kleist quickly and correctly announced his discovery to the scientific community.

The paper presents Lewis Campbell (1830–1908), his research on Plato, and the collection of letters sent to this Scottish scholar by: James Martineau (1805–1900), William Hepworth Thompson (1810–1886), Paul Shorey (1857–1934), Wincenty Lutosławski (1863–1954), Eduard Gottlob Zeller (1814–1908), Franz Susemihl (1826–1901), and Theodor Gomperz (1832–1912). This collection supplements the knowledge of the research on Plato’s dialogues at the turn of the 20th century, since Plato scholars in their letters touched on the issues relating to the methods and results of the research on the chronology of Plato’s dialogues. They made judgements concerning the works of other academics, they sent to each other their own publications, and reported on the progress of their studies. They also did not shy away from making personal remarks and communicating personal reflections.

Legal theory was the main field of Leon Petrażycki’s investigations. However, his interests also included philosophy, methodology, psychology and sociology. His views in these fields were non-trivial, not only as far as the cognitive horizon of his time was concerned, but also with regard to the present epoche. Particularly significant is the idea of politics of law, i.e. the investigation and prediction of social effects of legal systems.

Possible reasons are studied why Ladislas (Władysław) Natanson’s paper on the statistical theory of radiation, published in 1911 both in English and in the German translation, was not cited properly in the early history of quantum statistics by outstanding scientists, such as Arnold Sommerfeld, Paul Ehrenfest, Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein.

The social and psychological aspects are discussed as background to many so far discussions on the academic evaluation of his theory.

In order to avoid in the future such Natansonian cases of very limited reception of valuable scientific works, it is proposed to introduce a digital tag in which all the information of relevant papers published so far should be automatically accumulated and updated.

The article discusses an extraordinary event, i.e. the First International Cosmic Rays Conference, which took place in Cracow in 1947, shortly after the end of the Second World War. The conference was organized by a group of theoretical physicists from the Jagiellonian University and the Academy of Mining under the leadership of Professor Jan Weyssenhoff. The achievements of Polish physicists, especially Cracow scientists, who were involved in the study of cosmic radiation in the 1930s and 1940s are reminded of in this article. The author recalls names of outstanding physicists representing the most wellknown research centers in Europe and the United States during the Conference. The article was enriched with photographs taken during the Conference and numerous unofficial meetings that took place in October 1947 in Cracow. The author of the pictures, Andrzej Hrynkiewicz, was a young scientist, and later professor of nuclear physics at the Jagiellonian University and the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The article presents essential reservations about the proposal and the adopted Act 2.0 vel Constitution for Science. It focuses on the analysis of two topics: model of university and model of evaluation of journals and books. Our analysis is made in the light of knowledge of integrated sciences of science (containing, i.a., history of science, history of organization of higher education system and science, scientometrics and bibliometrics) and a model of university of new humanism.

The article calls for introduction of series of vital modifications in the analyzed Act 2.0 and implementing regulations to remedy their fundamental drawbacks.

I reply to recent arguments by Peter Barker & Tofigh Heidarzadeh, Arun Bala, and F. Jamil Ragep claiming that certain aspects Copernicus’s astronomical models where influenced by late Islamic authors connected with the Maragha school. In particular, I argue that: the deleted passage in De revolutionibus that allegedly references unspecified previous authors on the Tusi couple actually refers to a simple harmonic motion, and not the Tusi couple; the arguments based on lettering and other conventions used in Copernicus’s figure for the Tusi couple have no evidentiary merit whatever; alleged indications that Nicole Oresme was aware of the Tusi couple are much more naturally explained on other grounds; plausibility considerations regarding the status of Arabic astronomy and norms regarding novelty claims weight against the influence thesis, not for it.

The article regards the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marie Sklodowska-Curie − a discoverer of polonium and radium, twice decorated with a Noble Prize, the first woman professor of the Sorbonne, who in the ranking organized by the periodical New Scientist was considered the most outstanding and inspiring scientist of all time.

In her youth, many universities (among them also Polish) were closed to women, so Marie Skłodowska studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. When, after her studies, she was not accepted as an assistant at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland), Marie Skłodowska came back to Paris, married Pierre Curie and started her scientific work in his humble lab.

The scientific achievements of Maria Skłodowska-Curie were a breakthrough in the history of exact sciences and the basis for the application of new methods in oncological therapies. For modern scientists she is a timeless source of inspiration and is admired not only for her scientific achievements but also for her courage in breaking barriers and helping to redefine the role of women in society and science.

On November 7, 2017, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s birth. In Poland and abroad many events were organized during the whole year of 2017 to commemorate her life and achievements. Some of them, as well as some aspects of Skłodowska-Curie’s life and work are described in this paper.

The report discusses the activities of the Commission on the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017/2018. It presents the lists of: scientific meetings, new members, new publications, and members who have died.

The report discusses the activities of the Commission on the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017/2018. It presents the lists of: scientific meetings, new members, new publications, and members who have died.

In this note we present brief curriculum vitae and scientific achievements of the recently deceased astronomer Piotr Flin.

The bibliography presents the list of publications by Piotr Flin (1945–2018), an astronomer and exact sciences historian.

This study presents a list of two hundred and fifty (including two hundred and forty-three separate) publications of the late Piotr Flin and a list of three doctoral theses he supervised. It is likely that the list of publications presented is not a complete bibliography of the author’s works.

Due to the specificity of the study, the co-authored publications are listed in a chronological order, not an alphabetical order of co-authors. In addition, compared to the standard bibliographical style adopted in the journal, the date of publication appears at the end of each bibliographic record in square brackets. Providing the date in this format follows the convention adopted on the SAO / NASA portal Astrophysics Data System and its enriched copy: “The Science Archive Facility” at the European Southern Observatory. In accordance with the conventions adopted in the aforementioned portals, the list of publications also includes two reviews of a co-authored monograph by P. Flin.

This article focuses on life and scientific developments of Zbigniew Bela (1948–2018) who was professor of the history of pharmacy and director of the Museum of Pharmacy of Jagiellonian University in Cracow. The aim of the article is to identify specificity of his research activity, particular because he was a Polish language scholar, however, interested in the history of pharmacy. It was proven that he used literary perspective to investigate the history of pharmacy that was very original and peculiar. His most important achievements were monographs inspired and illustrated by items from the Museum of Pharmacy in Cracow, especially the 16th century formulary by Alexey from Piedmont.

The bibliography presents the list of publications by Zbigniew Bela (1949–2018), a philologist, prosaist, and historian of pharmacy.