A note on the work and life of kazimierz kuratowski

Kazimierz Kuratowski was born February 2, 1896. His father was a famous Warsaw lawyer. Kuratowski attended the Chrzanowski secondary school of Philology (now called the Zamoyski Secondary School). Upon graduation he studied in Glasgow during the academic year 19 13-1 9 14. In the summer of 19 14 he came home for school holidays and had to remain in Poland because of the outbreak of war. In 19 15 he entered the restored Warsaw University whose work had been suspended by tsarist authorities since 1869. As a student he was one of the leading social workers in the patriotic students movement. In 19 18 Kuratowski published his first mathematical paper. He graduated from the University in 1919. In 1920, Professors Z. Janiszewski, S . Mazurkiewicz, and W. Sierpinski launched the journal Fundamenta Mathematicae devoted primarily to set theory, theory of real functions, mathematical logic, and topology. A group of young mathematicians gathered around this journal, and one of its most active members was Kuratowski. In the future this group would be called the Warsaw School of Mathematics. The first papers of Kuratowski were concerned mainly with topology and the foundations of set theory. In 1922 he published the wellknown paper about the elimination of ordinal numbers from mathematical arguments. This result was rediscovered a dozen or so years later by Zorn (in somewhat different form) and is nowadays known as the “Kuratowski-Zorn Lemma.” Kuratowski received his Ph.D. in 192 1, presenting in his dissertation, among other things, a simple system of axioms for a topological space based on the primitive notion of the closure of a set. In the same year he passed the qualifying examination for the title of docent. Together with B. Knaster and S. Mazurkiewicz he launched systematic studies of the notion of connectivity and other fundamental concepts of topology. He devoted much attention to the topology of the plane.