Hugo Steinhaus - Legacy

Legacy

Steinhaus is said to have "discovered" the Polish mathematician Stefan Banach in 1916, after he overheard someone utter the words "Lebesgue integral" while in a Kraków park (Steinhaus referred to Banach as his "greatest mathematical discovery"). Together with Banach and the other participant of the park discussion, Otto Nikodym, Steinhaus started the Mathematical Society of Kraków, which later evolved into the Polish Mathematical Society. He was a member of PAU (the Polish Academy of Learning) and PAN (the Polish Academy of Sciences), PTM (the Polish Mathematical Society), the Wrocławskie Towarzystwo Naukowe (Wrocław Scientific Society) as well as many international scientific societies and science academies.

Steinhaus also published one of the first articles in Fundamenta Mathematicae, in 1921. He also co-founded Studia Mathematica along with Stefan Banach (1929), and Zastosowania matematyki (Applications of Mathematics, 1953), Colloquium Mathematicum, and Monografie Matematyczne (Mathematical Monographs).

He received honorary doctorate degrees from Warsaw University (1958), Wrocław Medical Academy (1961), Poznań University (1963) and Wrocław University (1965).

Steinhaus had full command of several foreign languages and was interestingly, known, for his aphorisms, to the point that a booklet of his most famous ones in Polish, French and Latin has been published posthumously.

In 2002, the Polish Academy of Sciences and Wrocław University sponsored "2002, The Year of Hugo Steinhaus", to celebrate his contributions to Polish and world science.

Notable mathematician Mark Kac, Steinhaus's student, wrote:

"He was one of the architects of the school of mathematics which flowered miraculously in Poland between the two wars and it was he who, perhaps more than any other individual, helped to raise Polish mathematics from the ashes to which it had been reduced by the second World War to the position of new strength and respect which it now occupies. He was a man of great culture and in the best sense of the word a product of Western civilization."