A short history of Polish mathematics

In this article I shall explain how Poland- a country having at the beginning of 20th century almost no mathematical traditions- could achieve, within a relatively short period 1919-1939, a good international position in such fields of mathematics as functional analy-sis, topology, set theory, functions of a real variable, logic and foundations of mathematics, and good forecasts for the future development of probability theory, differential equations and Fourier analysis. The reason why we had poor mathematical traditions is rather clear. In 19th century – a period of a great development of mathematics in Western Europe – Poland was not an independent country. In 1795 it was partitioned between Austria, Russia and Prussia (Germany was not yet unified), and the independence was retrieved only at the end of 1918. Thus in 19th century the essential effort of the nation was set onto humanities, since literature and poetry were necessary for supporting the idea of independence and even for preservation of the language (in some periods the children in Prussian or Russian parts were taught only in German or Russian and Polish language was forbidden; the situation in the Austrian part was much more liberal). For that reason the mathematical papers were written only in Polish, so even if there were some original results, they remained not recognized by the mathematical community. Before the first World War (1914-18) there were in the Russian part of Polish territories two universities, a Russian University in Warsaw, offering lectures only in Russian (evacuated at the outburst of the war to Rostov-on Don, where it still exists; the previous University of Warsaw, with Polish professors, was closed after the upraising against Russians in 1863). Mathematics was taught there by a quite good Russian mathematician G. Voronoy, working mostly in number theory. The other university in Wilno (now Vilnius in Lithuania), was of much lower level. I