Kazimierz Kuratowski
Kazimierz Kuratowski
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Kazimierz Kuratowski

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Kazimierz Kuratowski

Kazimierz Kuratowski (Polish pronunciation: [kaˈʑimjɛʂ kuraˈtɔfskʲi]; 2 February 1896 – 18 June 1980) was a Polish mathematician and logician. He was one of the leading representatives of the Warsaw School of Mathematics. He worked as a professor at the University of Warsaw and at the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IM PAN). Between 1946 and 1953, he served as President of the Polish Mathematical Society.

He is primarily known for his contributions to set theory, topology, measure theory and graph theory. Some of the notable mathematical concepts bearing Kuratowski's name include Kuratowski's theorem, Kuratowski closure axioms, Kuratowski-Zorn lemma and Kuratowski's intersection theorem.

Kazimierz Kuratowski was born in Warsaw, (then part of Congress Poland controlled by the Russian Empire), on 2 February 1896. He was a son of Marek Kuratow, a barrister, and Róża Karzewska. He completed a Warsaw secondary school, which was named after general Paweł Chrzanowski. In 1913, he enrolled in an engineering course at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, in part because he did not wish to study in Russian;[citation needed] instruction in Polish was prohibited. He completed only one year of study when the outbreak of World War I precluded any further enrolment. In 1915, Russian forces withdrew from Warsaw and Warsaw University was reopened with Polish as the language of instruction. Kuratowski restarted his university education there the same year, this time in mathematics. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1921, in the newly established Second Polish Republic.

In autumn 1921 Kuratowski was awarded the Ph.D. degree for his groundbreaking work. His thesis statement consisted of two parts. One was devoted to an axiomatic construction of topology via the closure axioms. This first part (republished in a slightly modified form in 1922) has been cited in hundreds of scientific articles.

The second part of Kuratowski's thesis was devoted to continua irreducible between two points. This was the subject of a French doctoral thesis written by Zygmunt Janiszewski. Since Janiszewski was deceased, Kuratowski's supervisor was Stefan Mazurkiewicz. Kuratowski's thesis solved certain problems in set theory raised by a Belgian mathematician, Charles-Jean Étienne Gustave Nicolas, Baron de la Vallée Poussin.

Two years later, in 1923, Kuratowski was appointed deputy professor of mathematics at Warsaw University. He was then appointed a full professor of mathematics at Lwów Polytechnic in Lwów, in 1927. He was the head of the Mathematics department there until 1933. Kuratowski was also dean of the department twice. In 1929, Kuratowski became a member of the Warsaw Scientific Society

While Kuratowski associated with many of the scholars of the Lwów School of Mathematics, such as Stefan Banach and Stanislaw Ulam, and the circle of mathematicians based around the Scottish Café he kept close connections with Warsaw. Kuratowski left Lwów for Warsaw in 1934, before the famous Scottish Book was begun (in 1935), hence did not contribute any problems to it. He did however, collaborate closely with Banach in solving important problems in measure theory.

In 1934 he was appointed the professor at Warsaw University. A year later Kuratowski was nominated as the head of the Mathematics department there. From 1936 to 1939 he was secretary of the Mathematics Committee in The Council of Science and Applied Sciences.

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