Person: Pawlak, Zdzisław
Zdzislaw Pawlak was a Polish mathematician and computer scientist who was known for his contribution to many branches of theoretical computer science.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- One such firm was Siemens engineering company and Pawlak was forced to work for them.
- In 1946 Pawlak, now twenty years old, took his high school examinations and, in the following year began to study in the Electrical Engineering Faculty of the Łódź University of Technology.
- The Łódź University of Technology was only founded in May 1945 and so it was a very young institution when Pawlak began his studies there.
- Pawlak studied there from 1947 to 1949 before going to study at the Faculty of Telecommunications of the Technical University of Warsaw.
- All these influenced Pawlak, in particular Marczyński and Bochenek who both acted as his advisors at different stages of his studies.
- In 1951 Pawlak was awarded a Master's Degree in Telecommunication Engineering for his thesis A clock for the electronic computing machine which had been supervised by the computer pioneer Romuald Marczynski.
- The work which Pawlak undertook for his Master's thesis led him to develop a pseudo-random number generator.
- During this time, in 1958, Pawlak was awarded a Candidate's Degree (equivalent to a Ph.D.) for his thesis Application of Graph Theory to the Decoder Synthesis.
- Based on the experience gathered during the construction of reliable, complex electronic devices in the 1950s, the PARK group attempted to build its own "mathematical machine." Professor Pawlak played a crucial role in the project.
- Based on Professor Pawlak's ideas, an Electronic Digital Machine and, later (after Pawlak's transfer to the Mathematical Institute of Polish Academy of Sciences), a prototype (1960) and five machines of the test series of Universal Digital Machine (UMC-1) were built.
- After his transfer from the Department to the Institute of Mathematics, Pawlak's involvement with the personnel of the Department continued.
- After 1959 Pawlak was appointed to the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and, in 1963, he was awarded his habilitation from the Polish Academy of Sciences for his monograph Organization of Address-less Machines (Polish).
- Let us record the details of the rest of Pawlak's career.
- In addition to these, however, Pawlak held other positions.
- Pawlak wrote over 200 papers on a wide variety of topics including mathematical linguistics, automata theory, automated theorem proving, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, representation of incomplete information and handling uncertainty.
- Towards the end of his life Pawlak became interested in logic and the foundations of mathematics, in particular in the work of Gottlob Frege, Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski and Bertrand Russell.
- We learn about Pawlak's character from several of the obituaries referenced below.
- Among many passions Zdzisław had was antique restoration.
- For this reason, he was affectionately known to some of us as Papa Pawlak.
Born 10 November 1926, Łódź, Poland. Died 7 April 2006, Warsaw, Poland.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Poland
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- 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
