Warsaw School of Mathematics

The Mianowski Foundation, while not alone, did as much as possible to support Polish science and mathematics.
With its considerable financial resources (its assets included an oilfield in the Caucauses) it supported doctoral students studying abroad, scholars engaged in significant research, student scholarships, and publications.

It supported a series of books called Poradnik dla Samoukow (Guidebooks for Self-Instruction). These were designed to get around the Russian and German educational restrictions and were written by prominent mathematicians including Janiszewski, Sierpinski, and Zaremba; they covered topics such as series, differential and integral equations, and topology. Another series it supported was Nauka Polska jej Potrzeby Organizacja I Rozwój (Sciences and Letters in Poland, Their Needs, Organization and Progress); the first issue (1917) contained two articles which were to be very important to the establishment of the Polish School of Mathematics.

The first article was by Stanislaw Zaremba, who noted that a number of secondary school teachers had the potential to be future scholars; he urged that a way be found to have them sent abroad for further study. The second article `On the Needs of Mathematics in Poland' by Zygmunt Janiszewski outlined the plan for what was to be the Polish School of Mathematics.

The next year a third article appeared in Nauka Polska; it was written by Stefan Mazurkiewicz.

Nationhood was restored to Poland at the end of World War I, and the University of Warsaw opened in 1918 with Janiszewski, Mazurkiewicz, and Sierpinski as professors of mathematics. The three initiated Janiszewki's proposals with Warsaw serving as the proposed mathematical research center, and with set theory, including related areas such as topology and parts of real analysis, being chosen as the area of concentration.

The mathematicians published in the journal Fundamenta Mathematicae, founded in 1920—one of the world's first specialist pure-mathematics journals. It was in this journal, in 1933, that Alfred Tarski—whose illustrious career would a few years later take him to the University of California, Berkeley—published his celebrated theorem on the undefinability of the notion of truth.

While Fundamenta was conceived as an international journal, the first volume deliberately contained only papers by Polish authors.

Lwów School of Mathematics

A second center concentrating on functional analysis was started in Lwow, where Banach and Steinhaus were professors, and the journal Studia Mathematica was founded in 1929, also devoted to functional analysis. The publication of Banach's thesis in Volume 3 of Fundamenta Mathematicae had marked the beginning of functional analysis as a discipline, and much of its development was recorded in Studia Mathematica. While both centers were very strong, cooperation between them was very good and their identities merged into the Polish School of Mathematics.

The mathematicians often met at the famous Scottish Café to discuss mathematical problems, and published in the journal Studia Mathematica.

Polish Notation

was invented in 1924 by Polish logician
Jan Łukasiewicz. It is also known as normal Polish notation (NPN), Łukasiewicz notation, Warsaw notation, Polish prefix notation or simply prefix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators precede their operands.