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Person: Orlicz, Wladyslaw

Władysław Orlicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in functional analysis and topology.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• In the late twenties and early thirties Orlicz worked as a teacher in private secondary schools and in a military school.
• Orlicz spent the academic year 1929/30 at Göttingen University on a scholarship in theoretical physics, not in mathematics.
• It should be emphasized that from the functional analysis point of view (that is, as function spaces) Orlicz spaces appeared for the first time in 1932 in Orlicz's paper: Über eine gewisse Klasse von Räumen vom Typus B Ⓣ(On a certain class of spaces of type B) in Bull.
• In the years 1931-1937 Orlicz worked at the Lwów Technical University.
• Working in Lwów Orlicz participated in the famous meetings at the Scottish Café (Kawiarnia Szkocka) where Stefan Banach, Hugo Steinhaus, Stanisław Ulam, Stanisław Mazur, Marek Kac, Juliusz Schauder, Stefan Kaczmarz and many others talked about mathematical problems and looked for their solutions.
• Orlicz is the author or co-author of 14 problems there.
• In 1937 Orlicz became a professor at Poznań University (now Adam Mickiewicz University) and spent the Second World War in Lwów.
• In March 1945 Orlicz went back to Poland and in May 1945 he returned to University of Poznań.
• In July 1948 Orlicz was promoted to an ordinary professorship.
• Orlicz continued his seminar Selected Problems of Functional Analysis until 1989.
• Orlicz collaborated with several mathematicians.
• Altogether Orlicz published 171 mathematical papers, about half of them in cooperation with several authors.
• Orlicz participated in congresses of mathematics in Oslo (1936), Edinburgh (1958), Stockholm (1962) and Warsaw (1983), and in many scientific conferences.
• Orlicz is also a co-author of two school textbooks.
• Orlicz was the editor of Commentationes Mathematicae (1955 - 1990), and of Studia Mathematica (1962 - 1990), and President of the Polish Mathematical Society (1977 - 1979).
• In 1956 Orlicz was elected a corresponding-member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and in 1961 its full member.
• Orlicz was awarded many high state decorations, prizes as well as medals of scientific institutions and societies, including the Stefan Banach Prize of the Polish Mathematical Society (1948), the Golden Cross of Merit (1954), the Commander's Cross of Polonia Restituta Order (1958), Honorary Membership of the Polish Mathematical Society (1973), the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation Award (1973), Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1973), Order of Distinguished Teacher (1977), Wacław Sierpiński Medal of the Warsaw University (1979), Medal of the Commission for National Education (1983) and the Individual State Prizes (second degree in 1952, first degree in 1966).
• Orlicz's contribution is important in the following areas in mathematics: function spaces (mainly Orlicz spaces), orthogonal series, unconditional convergence in Banach spaces, summability, vector-valued functions, metric locally convex spaces, Saks spaces, real functions, measure theory and integration, polynomial operators and modular spaces.
• Orlicz's ideas have inspired the research of many mathematicians.
• The term Orlicz spaces appeared in the sixties in the Mathematics Subject Classification index of the American Mathematical Society in Section 4635, which is now 46E30, Spaces of measurable functions (Lp -spaces, Orlicz spaces, etc.
• For example, the Orlicz-Pettis theorem says that in Banach spaces the classes of weakly subseries convergent and norm unconditionally convergent series coincide.
• In the late seventies Orlicz started to collect information about mathematicians from Lwów and he was planning to write a book on the History of the Lwów School of Mathematics (he published only two articles: The Lwów School of Mathematics between the Wars, Wiadom.
• Orlicz died on 9 August, 1990 in Poznań when correcting the galley proofs of his last paper accepted for publication in Mathematica Japonica.

Born 24 May 1903, Okocim, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland). Died 9 August 1990, Poznań, Poland.

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive