Person: Zarankiewicz, Kazimierz

Kazimierz Zarankiewicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in topology.

Zarankiewicz completed his secondary school education and entered the University of Warsaw in 1919.
Janiszewski and Mazurkiewicz were conducting a topology seminar there from 1917 onwards, Sierpiński arrived in 1918, and in 1919, the year Zarankiewicz arrived, Kuratowski had just graduated and was beginning his doctoral studies.
With such a concentration on topology, and the excitement of those studying this new discipline in their newly freed country, it is not surprising that this was the area which attracted Zarankiewicz.
Zarankiewicz was appointed to Warsaw University as an assistant in 1924 and continued with his research on topological properties of the plane for his habilitation thesis.
On acceptance of this thesis in 1929 Zarankiewicz was appointed as a dozent at the University of Warsaw.
On his return to Warsaw, Zarankiewicz taught both at the Polytechnic and at the Agricultural College.
Zarankiewicz risked his life during the war teaching in the underground university which had been set up by the Poles in German occupied Warsaw to try to keep the intellectual life going.
Zarankiewicz paid dearly for teaching in the underground university for in 1944 he was sent to a labour camp in Germany.
Zarankiewicz did important work in topology and graph theory.
His work on triangular numbers inspired Sierpiński to further work on this topic while Zarankiewicz also worked jointly with Kuratowski on topology.
Zarankiewicz made several other important contributions to mathematics.

Born 2 May 1902, Częstochowa, Russian Empire (now Poland). Died 5 September 1959, London, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Poland, Topology

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

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