Kazimierz Kuratowski

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1 Biography
2 Research
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
6 Notes

Kazimierz Kuratowski (Warsaw, February 2, 1896 — June 18, 1980) was a Polish mathematician and logician.

[edit] Biography

Kuratowski became a professor of mathematics in 1927 at the Lwów Polytechnic in Lwów, Poland, and from 1934 at Warsaw University. In 1945 he became a member of the Polish Academy of Learning, and in 1952 of the Polish Academy of Sciences. From 1948 until 1967 he was director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and he was also a long-time chairman of the Polish and International Mathematics Societies.

Kazimierz Kuratowski was one of a celebrated group of Polish mathematicians who would meet at Lwów's Kawiarnia Szkocka (Scottish Café).

[edit] Research

Kuratowski's research was mainly focused on abstract topological and metric structures. With Alfred Tarski and Wacław Sierpiński he provided most of the theory concerning Polish spaces^[1] (that are indeed named after these mathematicians and their legacy). His contributions to mathematics also include:

a characterization of Hausdorff spaces in terms of what are now called Kuratowski closure axioms;
proof of the Kuratowski-Zorn lemma;
in graph theory, the characterization of planar graphs now known as Kuratowski's theorem;
identification of the ordered pair $(x, y)$ with the set ${{x},{x, y}}$ .
the introduction of the Tarski-Kuratowski algorithm.
Kuratowski's closure-complement problem

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Kazimierz Kuratowski, A Half Century of Polish Mathematics: Remebrances and Reflections, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1980, ISBN 0-08-023046-6.
Karol Borsuk, "On the Achievements of Prof. Dr. Kazimierz Kuratowski in Topology" (in Polish), Wiadomości matematyczne, vol. 2, no. 3, 1960, pp. 231-237.