Person: Alexiewicz, Andrzej Tadeusz
Andrzej Alexiewicz was a Polish mathematician, born in what is now Ukraine, who was an expert at functional analysis.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- The city quickly became an important Polish centre for learning and culture and it was in this atmosphere that Andrzej's education took place.
- After graduating from High School, Alexiewicz began his studies at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów.
- It was the third largest of Poland's universities, having around 6000 students when Alexiewicz began to study there.
- Żyliński had supervised Władysław Orlicz's doctoral thesis on orthogonal series and it was Orlicz who became a friend, advisor and collaborator of Alexiewicz.
- In 1941 Alexiewicz was appointed as an assistant lecturer at the Lwów State University, but in June 1941 Germany attacked its former ally, the Soviet Union.
- The university could no longer operate, so Alexiewicz had to give up his position there.
- Alexiewicz was one of the academics working there, but he also taught in an underground university, and continued to undertake research towards his doctorate.
- In fact, several years later, Alexiewicz submitted a two-part paper On sequences of operations based on his thesis to Studia Mathematica which was published in volume 11 in 1949-50.
- Now, as the war entered its final stages, Alexiewicz realised that Lwów would not remain a part of Poland when the war ended.
- This made Poznań a natural choice for Alexiewicz since he would remain a colleague of Orlicz.
- Orlicz, who held the chair of mathematics, and Alexiewicz then faced a major task rebuilding the department of mathematics at Poznań which had been completely destroyed during the war.
- The reopened Polish University of Poznań, to which Orlicz and Alexiewicz were appointed, was a small institution with hardly any infrastructure and few teaching staff.
- Alexiewicz was awarded a doctorate in July 1945 on the basis of his thesis which had been examined in Lwów.
- It is in this work that Alexiewicz introduced the 'Alexiewicz norm', which is an integral norm that makes a certain space of integrable functions into a topological vector space.
- In 1953 Alexiewicz was promoted to associate professor, becoming an ordinary professor in 1961 after a reorganisation had taken place at the University of Poznań.
- A new Institute of Mathematics was created, its first head being Alexiewicz who held this position until he retired in 1987.
- During his time at Poznań, Alexiewicz held a number of important positions in the university.
- We have indicated above some of the mathematical areas that Alexiewicz worked on.
- The painting presented the waterfall "Huk" in Kosmacz, one of the favourite places of professor Alexiewicz.
- Professor Andrzej Alexiewicz had a discerning musical taste.
Born 11 February 1917, Lwów, Poland, Austria-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine). Died 11 July 1995, Poznań, Poland.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Ukraine
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
