Karol Borsuk
Karol Borsuk (born May 8, 1905 in Warsaw ; † January 24, 1982 ibid) was a Polish mathematician .
Life
He studied at the University of Warsaw (graduating in 1927) and did his doctorate there in 1930 with Stefan Mazurkiewicz ( Sur les rétractes ). In Lwow he met Stanisław Ulam and worked with him. After Germany occupied Poland in World War II , Polish intellectuals were persecuted and Borsuk had to go into hiding. After the war, Borsuk played an important role in the reconstruction of the Polish educational system and was professor of mathematics in Warsaw from 1946.
His main interest was topology , such as homotopy theory . He introduced retracts in his dissertation , and cohomotopy groups and the Shape Theory (from 1968) can also be traced back to him. The Borsuk-Ulam theorem , proven by Borsuk in 1933, is named after him and Ulam , and his name is also connected to the famous Borsuk conjecture , refuted in 1993 , which Borsuk formulated as an open question in the same article. Borsuk discovered the Warsaw District, named after his place of work .
In 1954 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam ( On the Elimination of Paradoxical Phenomena in Topology , given in French).
From 1956 he was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences .
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Karol Borsuk. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Author profile in the database zbMATH
Individual evidence
- ↑ Karol Borsuk: Three sentences about the n-dimensional Euclidean sphere ( PDF file , 1.1 MB), Fundamenta Mathematicae 20, 1933, pp. 177–190
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Borsuk, Karol |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Polish mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 8, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Warsaw |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 24, 1982 |
| Place of death | Warsaw |