Tadeusz Banachiewicz

Memorial plaque in the Cracow Botanical Garden

Tadeusz Banachiewicz (born February 13, 1882 in Warsaw , Russian Empire ; died November 17, 1954 in Krakow ) was a Polish astronomer , mathematician and geodesist .

life and work

Banachiewicz studied at the University of Warsaw and after its closure by the Russian rule in 1905 in Göttingen , where he met Wacław Sierpiński . In 1915 he completed his habilitation at the University of Kazan and until 1918 worked as an astronomer at the observatories of several Russian universities, most recently in Dorpat . After the restoration of Poland, he became a professor at the Technical University of Warsaw in 1918 and a year later at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and director of the observatory there. In 1922 he became a member of the Polska Akademia Umiejętności .

In 1923 he presented his " Cracovian theory" ( Krakauer calculus ) in its bulletin , a special kind of matrix algebra that brought him international recognition. With these “Krakowians” the matrix multiplication is carried out according to the rule “column times column”. Banachiewicz applied them to celestial mechanics. He also did important work on celestial mechanics, in particular for determining the orbit of comets and for astronomical perturbation calculations.

In 1925 he founded Acta Astronomica magazine . From 1932 to 1938 he was Vice President of the International Astronomical Union and at the same time the first President of the Polish Astronomical Society. On November 6, 1939, he and other Krakow professors were arrested as part of the Krakow special campaign and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In 1952 he became a member of the Polska Akademia Nauk . He was honorary doctor of the University of Warsaw, the University of Poznan and the University of Sofia .

The lunar crater Banachiewicz and the asteroid (1286) Banachiewicza are named after him.

literature

• Observo ergo sum: Tadeusz Banachiewicz 1882–1954; Anna Karolina Zawada; Kraków 2004 (Polish and English)
• Obituary in Monthly Notices Royal Astronomical Society 1957
• Jochen August (Ed.): "Special Campaign Krakau". The arrest of the Krakow scientists on November 6, 1939. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 3-930908-28-X , p. 279

Web links

• The Observatory in the years of T. Banachiewicz's management (1919–1954) (English)
• Zastosowania matematyki w pracach naukowych Tadeusza Banachiewicza (1882–1954) (Polish; PDF; 137 kB)
• Publications by T. Banachiewicz in the Astrophysics Data System