Edward Marczewski (15 November 1907 – 17 October 1976) was a Polish

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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. He was born Szpilrajn but changed his name while hiding from Nazi persecution. Marczewski was a member of the

Warsaw School of Mathematics Warsaw School of Mathematics is the name given to a group of mathematicians who worked at Warsaw, Poland, in the two decades between the World Wars, especially in the fields of logic, set theory, point-set topology and real analysis. They publish ...

. His life and work after the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

were connected with

Wrocław Wrocław is a city in southwestern Poland, and the capital of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship. It is the largest city and historical capital of the region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the Oder River in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Eu ...

, where he was among the creators of the Polish scientific centre. He worked at the State Institute of Mathematics, which was incorporated into the

Polish Academy of Sciences The Polish Academy of Sciences (, PAN) is a Polish state-sponsored institution of higher learning. Headquartered in Warsaw, it is responsible for spearheading the development of science across the country by a society of distinguished scholars a ...

in 1952. Marczewski's main fields of interest were

measure theory In mathematics, the concept of a measure is a generalization and formalization of geometrical measures (length, area, volume) and other common notions, such as magnitude (mathematics), magnitude, mass, and probability of events. These seemingl ...

descriptive set theory In mathematical logic, descriptive set theory (DST) is the study of certain classes of "well-behaved" set (mathematics), subsets of the real line and other Polish spaces. As well as being one of the primary areas of research in set theory, it has a ...

general topology In mathematics, general topology (or point set topology) is the branch of topology that deals with the basic set-theoretic definitions and constructions used in topology. It is the foundation of most other branches of topology, including differ ...

probability theory Probability theory or probability calculus is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expre ...

and

universal algebra Universal algebra (sometimes called general algebra) is the field of mathematics that studies algebraic structures in general, not specific types of algebraic structures. For instance, rather than considering groups or rings as the object of stud ...

. He also published papers on real and complex analysis, applied mathematics and mathematical logic. Marczewski proved that the

topological dimension In mathematics, the Lebesgue covering dimension or topological dimension of a topological space is one of several different ways of defining the dimension of the space in a topologically invariant way. Informal discussion For ordinary Euclidean ...

, for arbitrary

metrisable In topology and related areas of mathematics, a metrizable space is a topological space that is homeomorphic to a metric space. That is, a topological space (X, \tau) is said to be metrizable if there is a metric d : X \times X \to , \infty) su ...

separable space In mathematics, a topological space is called separable if it contains a countable, dense subset; that is, there exists a sequence ( x_n )_^ of elements of the space such that every nonempty open subset of the space contains at least one elemen ...

''X'', coincides with the

Hausdorff dimension In mathematics, Hausdorff dimension is a measure of ''roughness'', or more specifically, fractal dimension, that was introduced in 1918 by mathematician Felix Hausdorff. For instance, the Hausdorff dimension of a single point is zero, of a line ...

under one of the metrics in ''X'' which induce the given topology of ''X'' (while otherwise the Hausdorff dimension is always greater or equal to the topological dimension). This is a fundamental theorem of fractal theory. (Certain contributions to this development were also made by

Samuel Eilenberg Samuel Eilenberg (September 30, 1913 – January 30, 1998) was a Polish-American mathematician who co-founded category theory (with Saunders Mac Lane) and homological algebra. Early life and education He was born in Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland to ...

, see: Witold Hurewicz and Henry Wallman, ''Dimension Theory'', 1941, Chapter VII.)

References

External links

* * 1907 births 1976 deaths 20th-century Polish Jews Warsaw School of Mathematics People from Warsaw Governorate University of Warsaw alumni Academic staff of the University of Wrocław {{Poland-mathematician-stub