Born: March 14, 1882, Warsaw, Russian partition of Poland (presently Poland)
Died: October 21, 1969, Warsaw, Poland
Early days. Son of Waclaw Sierpinski's a medical doctor. He attended school in Warsaw where his talent for mathematics was quickly spotted by his first mathematics teacher.
Higher education.Despite of the difficulties caused by the Russians’ aim to keep illiteracy in occupied Poland as high as possible, Sierpinski entered the Department of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Warsaw in 1899. It would be more accurate to describe it as the Czar's University since this was the official name of the University which had become a Russian university in 1869. The lectures at the University were all in Russian and the staff was entirely Russian. It is not surprising therefore that it would be the work of a Russian mathematician, that first attracted Sierpinski.
In 1903 the Department of Mathematics and Physics offered a prize for the best essay from a student's contribution to the number theory. For his dissertation Sierpinski was awarded the gold medal in the competition. He described the events : -
... I was awarded a gold medal by the university for work in a competition on the theory of numbers. It was my first scientific work. It was accepted for publication in the 'Izvestia' of Warsaw University. However, in the following year there was a strike to produce a boycott of Russian Schools in Poland and I did not want to have my first work printed in the Russian language and that is why I had it withdrawn from print in Warsaw's 'Izvestia'. That is why it was not printed until 1907 in the mathematical magazine 'The works of Mathematics and Physics' published by Samuel Dickstein.
Fifty years after he graduated from the University of Warsaw Sierpinski looked back at the problems that he had as a Pole taking his degree at the time of the Russian occupation:-
... we had to attend a yearly lecture on the Russian language. ... Each of the students made it a point of honor to have the worst results in that subject. ... I did not answer a single question ... and I got an unsatisfactory mark. ... I passed all my examinations, then the lector suggested I should take a repeat examination, otherwise I would not be able to obtain the degree of a candidate for mathematical science. ... I refused him saying that this would be the first case at our University that someone having excellent marks in all subjects, having the dissertation accepted and a gold medal, would not obtain the degree of a candidate for mathematical science, but a lower degree, the degree of a 'real student' (strangely that was what the lower degree was called) because of one lower mark in the Russian language.
Sierpinski was lucky for the lector changed the mark on his Russian language course to 'good' so that he could take his degree. As he says:-
The policeman was human.
The results in the prize essay that Sierpinski wrote in 1904 were a major contribution to a famous problem on lattice points. Sierpinski graduated in 1904 and worked for a while as a school teacher of mathematics and physics in a girls school in Warsaw. However when the school closed because of a strike, Sierpinski decided to go to Kraków to study for his doctorate. At the Jagiellonian University in Kraków he attended lectures by Zaremba on mathematics, studying in addition astronomy and philosophy.
Appointment at the Lwow University. He received his doctorate and was appointed to the University of Lwow (then called Lemberg, a part of Austro-Hungarian empire, presently Ukrainian Lviv) in 1908.
In fact it was in 1907 that Sierpinski first became interested in set theory. Throughout his life Sierpinski maintained an incredible output of research papers and books. During the years 1908 to 1914, when he taught at the University of Lwow, he published three books in addition to many research papers. When World War I began in 1914, Sierpinski and his family were in Russia. At this time the governments of Austria and Russia tried to use the Polish question as a political weapon. Sierpinski was interned in Viatka. However Russian mathematicians Egorov and Luzin heard that he had been interned and arranged for him to be allowed to go to Moscow. Sierpinski spent the rest of the war years in Moscow working with Luzin. When World War I ended in 1918, Sierpinski returned to Lwow, Poland. However shortly after taking up his appointment again in Lwow he was offered a post at the University of Warsaw which he accepted.
Professorship in Warsaw. In 1919 he was promoted to professor at Warsaw and he spent the rest of his life there.
Founding Fundamenta Mathematica.In 1920 Sierpinski, together with his former student Mazurkiewicz, founded the important mathematics journal Fundamenta Mathematica. Sierpinski edited the journal which specialized in papers on set theory.
From this period Sierpinski worked mostly is in the area of set theory but also on general topology and on functions of a real variable. Sierpinski was also highly involved with the development of mathematics in Poland.
Honors. He had been honored with election to the Polish Academy in 1921 and he was made dean of the faculty at the University of Warsaw in the same year. In 1928 he became vice-chairman of the Warsaw Scientific Society and, in the same year was elected chairman of the Polish Mathematical Society.
Underground professorship. In 1939, with the advent of World War II, Sierpinski continued working in the 'Underground Warsaw University' while his official job was a clerk in the council offices in Warsaw. His publications continued since he managed to send papers to Italy. Each of these papers ended with the words:-
The proofs of these theorems will appear in the publication of Fundamenta Mathematica
which everyone understood meant 'Poland will survive'.
After the uprising of 1944 the Nazis burned his house destroying his library and personal letters. Sierpinski spoke of the tragic events of the war during a lecture he gave at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Cracow) in 1945. He spoke of his students who had died in the war:-
In July 1941 one of my oldest students Stanislaw Ruziewicz was murdered. He was a retired professor of Jan Kazimierz University in Lwow... an outstanding mathematician and an excellent teacher. In 1943 one of my most distinguished students Stanislaw Saks was murdered. He was an assistant professor at Warsaw University, one of the leading experts in the world in the theory of the integral... In 1942 another student of mine, Adolf Lindenbaum, was murdered. He was an assistant professor at Warsaw University and a distinguished author of works on set theory.
After listing colleagues who were murdered in the war such as Schauder and others who died as a result of the war such as Dickstein and Zaremba, Sierpinski continued:-
Thus more than half of the mathematicians who lectured in our academic schools were killed. It was a great loss for Polish mathematics which was developing favourably in some fields such as set theory and topology ... In addition to the lamented personal losses Polish mathematics suffered because of German barbarity during the war, it also suffered material losses. They burned down Warsaw University Library which contained several thousand volumes, magazines, mathematical books and thousands of reprints of mathematical works by different authors. Nearly all the editions of Fundamenta Mathematica (32 volumes) and ten volumes of Mathematical Monograph were completely burned. Private libraries of all the four professors of mathematics from Warsaw University and also quite a number of manuscripts of their works and handbooks written during the war were burnt too.
Achievemnts and honors. Sierpinski was the author of the incredible number of 724 (!) papers and 50 (!) books. He retired in 1960 as professor at the University of Warsaw but he continued to give a seminar on the theory of numbers at the Polish Academy of Sciences up to 1967. He also continued his editorial work, as editor-in-chief of Acta Arithmetica which he began in 1958, and as an editorial board member of Rendiconti dei Circolo Matimatico di Palermo, Composito Matematica and Zentralblatt für Mathematik.
Among many honors he received were: honorary degrees from the universities of Lwow (1929), St Marks of Lima (1930), Amsterdam (1931), Tarta (1931), Sofia (1939), Prague (1947), Wroclaw (1947), Lucknow (1949), and Lomonosov of Moscow (1967).
He was elected to the Geographic Society of Lima (1931), the Royal Scientific Society of Ličge (1934), the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1936), the national Academy of Lima (1939), the Royal Society of Sciences of Naples (1939), the Accademia dei Lincei of Rome (1947), the German Academy of Science (1950), the American Academy of Sciences 1959), the Paris Academy (1960), the Royal Dutch Academy (1961), the Academy of Science of Brussels (1961), the London Mathematical Society (1964), the Romanian Academy (1965) and the Papal Academy of Sciences (1967).
Rotkiewicz, who was a student of Sierpinski's wrote in [12]:-
Sierpinski had exceptionally good health and a cheerful nature. ... He could work under any conditions. ... He did not like any corrections to his papers. When someone suggested a correction he added a line to it: 'Mr X remarked that ...' He was a creative mind and liked creative mathematics. He was the greatest and most productive of Polish mathematicians.
Books:
Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990).
Articles:
Z. Adamowicz, Waclaw Sierpinski's contribution to general set theory (Polish), Wiadomosci matematyczne 26 (1) (1984), 9-18.
L P de Alcantara, Waclaw Sierpinski (Portuguese), Bol. Soc. Paran. Mat. (2) 3 (1) (1982), 33-35.
Iv. Dimovski, Waclaw Sierpinski (1882-1969) (Bulgarian), Fiz.-Mat. Spis. Bulgar. Akad. Nauk. 13 (46) (1970), 57-58.
R.Engelking, The papers of Waclaw Sierpinski in topology (Polish), Wiadomosci matematyczne 26 (1) (1984), 18-24.
M. M. Fryde, Waclaw Sierpinski- Mathematician, Scripta Mathematica 27 (1964), 105-111.
M. M. Fryde, Waclaw Sierpinski- mathematician, Polish Rev. 8 (8) (1963), 1-8.
K. Kuratowski, Waclaw Sierpinski (1882-1969), Acta Arithmetica 21 (1972), 1-5.
E. Marczewski, On the works of Waclaw Sierpinski: Main trends of his works on set theory. Recollections and reflections (Polish), Wiadomosci matematyczne (2) 14 (1972), 65-72.
I. G. Mel'nikov, Waclaw Sierpinski (Russian), Istor.-Mat. Issled. 24 (1979), 361-365.
Publications of Waclaw Sierpinski in the theory of numbers, Acta Arithmetica 21 (1972), 15-23.
A. Rotkiewicz, W. Sierpinski's works on the theory of numbers, Rend. Circ. Mat. Palermo (2) 21 (1972), 5-24.
A. Schinzel, Waclaw Sierpinski's papers on the theory of numbers, Acta Arithmetica 21 (1972), 7-13.
A. Schinzel, A biography of Waclaw Sierpinski (Polish), Wiadomosci matematyczne (2) 12 (1971), 303-308.
A. Schinzel, The role of Waclaw Sierpinski in the history of Polish mathematics (Polish), Wiadomosci matematyczne 26 (1) (1984), 1-9.
A. Schinzel, Waclaw Sierpinski's work in number theory (Polish), Wiadomosci matematyczne 26 (1) (1984), 24-31.
A. Schinzel, Waclaw Sierpinski (Polish), Mathematics at the turn of the twentieth century (Polish), Prace Nauk. Uniw. Slpolhk ask. Katowice. 1253 (Katowice, 1992), 9-15.
G. Sinkiewicz, On the collaboration of Waclaw Sierpinski and Nikolai Luzin (Polish), Kwart. Hist. Nauk. Tech. 40 (1) (1995), 41-58.
Source: St.Andrews university
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
GAP is Copyright (C) 1986--1997 by Lehrstuhl D fuer Mathematik,
RWTH Aachen, Aachen. Germany and Copyright (C) 1997-2001 by School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK
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