Hugo Steinhaus (nonfiction)

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Hugo Steinhaus.

Władysław Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus /ˈhjuːɡoʊ ˈstaɪnˌhaʊs/ (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 University in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering" mathematician Stefan Banach, with whom he gave a notable contribution to functional analysis through the Banach–Steinhaus theorem.

In September 1939 after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded and occupied Poland, as a fulfillment of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact they had signed earlier, Lwów initially came under Soviet occupation. Steinhaus considered escaping to Hungary but ultimately decided to remain in Lwów. The Soviets reorganized the university to give it a more Ukrainian character, but they did appoint Stefan Banach (Steinhaus's student) as the dean of the mathematics department and Steinhaus resumed teaching there. The faculty of the department at the school were also strengthened by several Polish refugees from German occupied Poland. According to Steinhaus, during the experience of this period, he "acquired an insurmountable physical disgust in regard to all sorts of Soviet administrators, politicians and commissars"

During the interwar period and the time of the Soviet occupation, Steinhaus contributed ten problems to the famous Scottish Book, including the last one, recorded shortly before Lwów was captured by the Nazis in 1941, during Operation Barbarossa.

Steinhaus, because of his Jewish background, spent the Nazi occupation in hiding, first among friends in Lwów, then in the small towns of Osiczyna, near Zamość and Berdechów, near Kraków. The Polish anti-Nazi resistance provided him with false documents of a forest ranger who had died sometime earlier, by the name of Grzegorz Krochmalny. Under this name he taught clandestine classes (higher education was forbidden for Poles under the German occupation). Worried about the possibility of imminent death if captured by Germans, Steinhaus, without access to any scholarly material, reconstructed from memory and recorded all the mathematics he knew, in addition to writing other voluminous memoirs, of which only a little part has been published.

After World War II Steinhaus played an important part in the establishment of the mathematics department at Wrocław University and in the revival of Polish mathematics from the destruction of the war.

Author of around 170 scientific articles and books, Steinhaus has left his legacy and contribution in many branches of mathematics, such as functional analysis, geometry, mathematical logic, and trigonometry. Notably he is regarded as one of the early founders of game theory and probability theory which led to later development of more comprehensive approaches by other scholars.

In the last days of World War II Steinhaus, still in hiding, heard a rumor that University of Lwów was to be transferred to the city of Breslau (Wrocław), which Poland was to acquire as a result of the Potsdam agreement (Lwów became part of Soviet Ukraine). Although initially he had doubts, he turned down offers for faculty positions in Łódź and Lublin and made his way to the city where he began teaching at University of Wrocław. While there, he revived the idea behind the Scottish Book from Lwów, where prominent and aspiring mathematicians would write down problems of interest along with prizes to be awarded for their solution, by starting the New Scottish Book. It was also most likely Steinhaus who preserved the original Scottish Book from Lwów throughout the war and subsequently sent it to Stanisław Ulam, who translated it into English.

With Steinhaus' help, Wrocław University became renowned for mathematics, much as the University of Lwów had been.

His interest in games led him to propose an early formal definition of a strategy, anticipating John von Neumann's more complete treatment of a few years later. Consequently, he is considered an early founder of modern game theory. As a result of his work on infinite games Steinhaus, together with another of his students, Jan Mycielski, proposed the Axiom of determinacy.

Later, in the 1960s, Steinhaus served as a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame (1961–62) and the University of Sussex (1966).

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