Hugo Steinhaus

Hugo Dyonizy Steinhaus (English: /ˈhjuːɡoʊ ˈstaɪnˌhaʊs/ HYOO-goh STYNE-howss, Polish: [ˈxuɡɔ ˈʂtajnxaws]; 14 January 1887 – 25 February 1972) was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering" mathematician Stefan Banach, with whom he gave a notable contribution to functional analysis through the Banach–Steinhaus theorem. After World War II Steinhaus played an important part in the establishment of the mathematics department at Wrocław University and in the revival of Polish mathematics from the destruction of the war.

Author of around 170 scientific articles and books, Steinhaus has left his legacy and contribution in many branches of mathematics, such as functional analysis, geometry, mathematical logic, and trigonometry. Notably he is regarded as one of the early founders of game theory and probability theory, which led to later development of more comprehensive approaches by other scholars.

Steinhaus was born on January 14, 1887, in Jasło, Austria-Hungary to a family with Jewish roots. His father, Bogusław, was a local industrialist, owner of a brick factory and a merchant. His mother was Ewelina, née Lipschitz. Hugo's uncle, Ignacy Steinhaus [pl], was a lawyer and an activist in the Koło Polskie (Polish Circle), and a deputy to the Galician Diet, the regional assembly of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.

Hugo finished his studies at the gymnasium in Jasło in 1905. His family wanted him to become an engineer but he was drawn to abstract mathematics and began to study the works of famous contemporary mathematicians on his own. In the same year he began studying philosophy and mathematics at the University of Lemberg. In 1906 he transferred to Göttingen University. At that University he received his Ph.D. in 1911, having written his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of David Hilbert. The title of his thesis was Neue Anwendungen des Dirichlet'schen Prinzips ("New applications to Dirichlet's principle").

At the start of World War I Steinhaus returned to Poland and served in Józef Piłsudski's Polish Legion, after which he lived in Kraków.

He was an atheist.

During the 1916-1917 period and before Poland had regained its full independence, which occurred in 1918, Steinhaus worked in Kraków for the Ministry of the Interior in the ephemeral puppet state of Kingdom of Poland.

In 1917 he started to work at the University of Lemberg (later Jan Kazimierz University in Poland) and acquired his habilitation qualification in 1920. In 1921 he became a profesor nadzwyczajny (associate professor) and in 1925 profesor zwyczajny (full professor) at the same university. During this time he taught a course on the then cutting edge theory of Lebesgue integration, one of the first such courses offered outside of France.