Józef Schreier (; 18 February 1909,

Drohobycz Drohobych ( uk, Дрого́бич, ; pl, Drohobycz; yi, דראָהאָביטש;) is a city of regional significance in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine. It is the administrative center of Drohobych Raion and hosts the administration of Drohobych urban hro ...

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

– April 1943, Drohobycz,

Occupied Poland ' ( Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 Octobe ...

) was a

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

origin, known for his work in

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (e.g. inner product, norm, topology, etc.) and the linear functions defined o ...

group theory In abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as group (mathematics), groups. The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as ring (mathematics), rings, field ...

and combinatorics. He was a member of the

Lwów School of Mathematics The Lwów school of mathematics ( pl, lwowska szkoła matematyczna) was a group of Polish mathematicians who worked in the interwar period in Lwów, Poland (since 1945 Lviv, Ukraine). The mathematicians often met at the famous Scottish Café to ...

and a victim of the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

. Józef Schreier was born on 18 February 1909 in Drohobycz. His father was a rabbi and doctor of philosophy. His cousin was the musician Alfred Schreyer. From 1927-31 he studied at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. In his first published paper, he defined what later came to be known as Schreier sets in order to show that not all Banach spaces possess the weak Banach-Saks property, disproving a conjecture of

Stefan Banach Stefan Banach ( ; 30 March 1892 – 31 August 1945) was a Polish mathematician who is generally considered one of the 20th century's most important and influential mathematicians. He was the founder of modern functional analysis, and an origina ...

and Stanisław Saks. Schreier sets were later discovered independently by researchers in

Ramsey theory Ramsey theory, named after the British mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, is a branch of mathematics that focuses on the appearance of order in a substructure given a structure of a known size. Problems in Ramsey theory typically ask ...

. Schreier completed his master's degree ''On tournament elimination systems'' in 1932 under the direction of

Hugo Steinhaus Hugo Dyonizy Steinhaus ( ; ; January 14, 1887 – February 25, 1972) was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the Jan Kazimierz Un ...

. Schreier correctly conjectured that to determine the second largest number in an unordered list requires at least

n + \lceil \log_2 n \rceil -2

comparisons. In 1934, he completed his doctorate, ''On finite base in topological groups'' under Banach. In 1932 he married Zofia Rosenblatt. Schreier often played

blindfold chess Blindfold chess, also known as ''sans voir'', is a form of chess play wherein the players do not see the positions of the pieces and do not touch them. This forces players to maintain a mental model of the positions of the pieces. Moves are commu ...

. He was a friend of

Stanisław Ulam Stanisław Marcin Ulam (; 13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish-American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapon ...

and co-authored eight papers with him. They were the only two undergraduates who attended the meetings at the

Scottish Café The Scottish Café ( pl, Kawiarnia Szkocka) was a café in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) where, in the 1930s and 1940s, mathematicians from the Lwów School of Mathematics collaboratively discussed research problems, particularly in functio ...

in Lwów. (Schreier contributed ten questions to the Scottish Book.) Together they proved the Baire–Schreier–Ulam theorem and Schreier–Ulam theorem. According to Ulam, With the outbreak of World War II, Eastern Poland including Drohobycz was occupied by the

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

in accordance with the

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that enabled those powers to partition Poland between them. The pact was signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ri ...

. After

Operation Barbarossa Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named after ...

, this territory was invaded by

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

. The Jews of Drohobycz were confined to the

Drohobycz Ghetto Drohobycz Ghetto or Drohobych Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto in the city of Drohobych in Western Ukraine during World War II. The ghetto was liquidated mainly between February and November 1942, when most Jews were deported to the Belzec extermination ...

. In April 1943, the Germans discovered—or were informed of—an underground bunker in which Schreier was hiding with other Jews. It took three days for them to force their way in. Schreier committed suicide by

cyanide Cyanide is a naturally occurring, rapidly acting, toxic chemical that can exist in many different forms. In chemistry, a cyanide () is a chemical compound that contains a functional group. This group, known as the cyano group, consists of ...

rather than be captured. Of a prewar Jewish population of 10,000 in Drohobycz, approximately 400 survived the war. Schreier's wife was one of them and later moved to Israel, where she remarried.

Publications

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Schreier, Józef 1909 births People from Drohobych Jews from Galicia (Eastern Europe) Lwów School of Mathematics Polish Jews who died in the Holocaust 1943 suicides Suicides by cyanide poisoning Suicides in Poland Suicides by Jews during the Holocaust