Person: Stark, Marceli
Marceli Stark was a Polish mathematician who published many important text-books.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Marceli was brought up in Lwów where he first attended an elementary school and then a gymnasium.
- At the University of Lwów, Stark was taught by Stefan Banach, Hugo Steinhaus and other leading Polish mathematicians.
- Not only did Lwów have an impressive collection of lecturers but perhaps even more remarkable is the list of outstanding students who studied with Stark over the following few years including Juliusz Schauder, Mark Kac, Stanisław Ulam, Władysław Orlicz, Wilhelm Birnbaum, Henryk Auerbach, Ludwik Sternbach, Stanisław Mazur and Julian Schreier.
- In 1929, while still an undergraduate, Stark was appointed as a junior assistant to Banach, who held the chair of mathematics, at the Mathematical Institute.
- Stark graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences in Lwów in 1933 and continued to work at the Mathematical Institute.
- Mark Kac got to know Stark when he attended a proseminar on algebra and number theory.
- Stark was very ready to help everyone and, in particular, he assisted Kac in many ways including translating his first serious mathematical note into English - the note was published in 1934.
- Stark was in Warsaw when the city fell to the Germans before the end of September when those defending the city were forced to surrender through lack of supplies.
- Stark was one of the half million confined to the ghetto were he lived for a while.
- Stark survived the Warsaw ghetto and was transferred to several concentration camps.
- Ravensbrück, in northern Germany, was a concentration camp mainly for women but some men, such as Stark, were also kept there.
- Remarkably, against all the odds, Stark survived this horrific experience and, after the defeat of Germany in 1945, was able to return to Poland.
- In 1946 Stark was appointed as a teaching associate at the University of Wrocław.
- Stark continued to work for the Institute, which became part of the Polish Academy of Sciences following its foundation in 1952.
- After the Academy was set up, the Institute was known as the Mathematics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Stark worked at the Institute for the rest of his life.
- Stark published several textbooks which were very popular in Poland and some were translated into other languages.
- All the rest of Stark's textbooks were written in collaboration with Andrzej Mostowski who had been appointed head of the division for the foundations of mathematics at the Mathematics Institute in the year the Institute was set up.
- The final collaboration between Stark and Mostowski led to The elements of higher algebra (Polish) which was essentially a rewrite of the first two volumes of their earlier Higher Algebra textbook although it certainly did not replace the earlier work as further editions of the earlier work continued to be produced after Elements of higher algebra was published.
- Stark concentrated much of his efforts in the later part of his career on publishing.
- Also, he was an editor for the Works of Juliusz Pawel Schauder, which was not published until 1978, four years after Stark's death, and an editor of the Selected Works of Wacław Sierpiński published in three volumes between 1974 and 1976.
- There were other roles that Stark took in addition to these relating to publishing.
Born 19 September 1908, Lemberg, Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine). Died 4 May 1974, Warsaw, Poland.
View full biography at MacTutor
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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
