Władysław Roman Orlicz (May 24, 1903 – August 9, 1990) 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 ...

of Lwów School of Mathematics. His main interests were

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 (for example, Inner product space#Definition, inner product, Norm (mathematics ...

and

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

: Orlicz spaces are named after him.

Education and career

Orlicz was the third of Franciszek and Maria Orlicz's five children. His youngest brother died in the Polish-Soviet War, the eldest perished in the Stutthof concentration camp. The other brothers also became professors. The family moved several times. Orlicz attended school in Tarnów,

Znojmo Znojmo (; ) is a town in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 34,000 inhabitants. Znojmo is the historical and cultural centre of southwestern Moravia and the second most populated town in the South Moravian Region. The hi ...

, and Lwów, where he finished school in 1920 and began studying mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic University. He studied with Hugo Steinhaus, Antoni Łomnicki and Stanisław Ruziewicz, among others. As early as 1923 he took on small tasks at the Faculty of Mathematics. On August 1, 1925 he became a junior assistant at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now University of Lviv). He published his first scientific work in 1926 at the age of 23. In 1928 he completed his dissertation on the theory of orthogonal sequences. In 1929 he went to University of Göttingen on a scholarship and returned to Lemberg in 1930 as a senior assistant. In 1934 he presented his habilitation thesis The investigations of orthogonal systems. The following year he became an assistant professor at the Lwów Polytechnic University and received his teaching license at the University of Lwów. In 1937, he became an associate professor at the University of Poznań. The outbreak of 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 ...

surprised him while he was on vacation in Lemberg. Since he could not return to Poznań, he was appointed professor in Lemberg. Officially he worked as a teacher. When it became clear in early 1945 that Lemberg would no longer belong to Poland, Orlicz went back to Poznań. In 1948 he was appointed full professor at the University of Poznań, where he remained until his retirement in 1970. He also 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. Orlicz was awarded the Stefan Banach Prize by the Polish Mathematical Society in 1948.

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References

1903 births 1990 deaths Lwów School of Mathematics Functional analysts Topologists Recipients of the State Award Badge (Poland) People from Brzesko County Lviv Polytechnic alumni Academic staff of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Academic staff of Lviv Polytechnic Academic staff of the University of Lviv 20th-century Polish mathematicians Recipients of the Medal of the 10th Anniversary of the People's Republic of Poland {{Poland-mathematician-stub

Education and career

See also

External links

References