Scottish book

The "Scottish Café" in Lviv

The entries of Stefan Banach , Stanisław Mazur and Stanisław Marcin Ulam

The entries by Juliusz Paweł Schauder , Hugo Steinhaus and John von Neumann

The Scottish Book ( Polish: Księga Szkocka ) is an 84-page booklet that the Lviv mathematicians , who often met in the " Scottish Coffee House ", used to write down unsolved mathematical problems. First they wrote down the formulas on paper napkins, and in the absence of napkins directly on the marble table tops, which the cloakroom kept until the next meeting, but finally the wife of Professor Stefan Banach bought a notebook that happily survived the Second World War and herself is now family owned in Germany.

The book was kept from 1935 to 1941, only when the German Wehrmacht marched in in June 1941 the line was drawn. 193 mathematical problems were noted in the book, including fundamental questions about functional analysis as well as simple puzzles. To solve one of the problems, a live goose was donated by Mazur as a prize in 1936. He personally awarded the prize to the young Swedish mathematician Per Enflo in 1972 .

The book was kept in the cloakroom by the cloakroom. Professor Stanisław Mazur agreed with Stanisław Ulam in the summer of 1939 that the book would be buried in a box in the event of war. It is not clear whether this actually happened, but what is certain is that Professor Banach's wife, Łucja, brought the book from Lviv to Warsaw during the forced relocation in 1945. After the war, Professor Ulam received a copy of the book and published an English translation.

In Wroclaw from 1945–1948 a “New Scottish Book” was kept by the former Lviv mathematicians. In autumn 2016 a "Lviv Scottish Book" was opened in Lviv.

See also

• Lviv math school
• Rearrangement of rows : Problem 106 of the Scottish Book ( Stefan Banach )
• Approximation property : Problem 153 of the Scottish Book ( Stanisław Mazur )
• Hilbert problems : List of 23 problems in mathematics

literature

• R. Daniel Mauldin (Editor): The Scottish Book: Mathematics from the Scottish Café, Birkhäuser, Cham 1981. 2nd edition 2016.

Web links

• Stan Ulam over the Scottish Book (Engl.)
• Overview of the Scottish Book (Engl.)
• English version of the Scottish Book in the translation Stanislaw Ulams, Los Alamos 1957 (PDF, 3.1 MB)
• Scan of the original of the Scottish Book (PDF, 6.6 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See The Lviv Scottish Book , accessed November 29, 2017.