Review of the book by Roman Duda, �Pearls from a lost city. The Lvov school of mathematics�

Abstract

This review is an extended version of my two short reviews of Duda's book that were published in MathSciNet and Mathematical Intelligencer. Here it is written about the Lvov School of Mathematics in greater detail, which I could not do in the short reviews. There are facts described in the book as well as some information the books lacks as, for instance, the information about the planned print in Mathematical Monographs of the second volume of Banach's book and also books by Mazur, Schauder and Tarski. Figure 1. Front page of Duda's bookMy two short reviews of Duda's book were published in MathSciNet [16] and Mathematical Intelligencer [17]. Here I write about the Lvov School of Mathematics in greater detail, which was not possible in the short reviews. I will present the facts described in the book as well as some information the books lacks as, for instance, the information about the planned print in Mathematical Monographs of the second volume of Banach's book and also books by Mazur, Schauder and Tarski. So let us start with a discussion about Duda's book.In 1795 Poland was partioned among Austria, Russia and Prussia (Germany was not yet unified) and at the end of 1918 Poland became an independent country. This was a good period for some remarkable development of science. Great mathematical centers were created in Warsaw (with Sierpiński, Mazurkiewicz and Kuratowski), Lvov (with Banach, Steinhaus and Mazur) and Cracow (with Zaremba andŻorawski). Unfortunately, Zaremba andŻorawski worked separately, and no mathematical school was formed in Cracow before the World War II. They did create, however, a scientific milieu in Cracow (cf. [3] and [30, pp. 217-220]).The Lvov School of Mathematics was a group of mathematicians in the Polish city Lvov (then Lwów), active in the period 1920-1945 under the leadership of Stefan Banach and Hugo Steinhaus who worked together, and often visited the Scottish Café (Kawiarnia Szkocka) to

Towards the Philosophy of the Lwów School of Mathematics

“…A lot of attention is paid to outstanding personalities of Lwów mathematics of that period. Of course, it is difficult to achieve completeness in such a book, and the review [Maligranda 2016] provides an important additional information concerning the school. We also mention the recent edition [Domoradzki, Stawiska-Friedland et al 2021].…”