24 Facts About Stefan Banach

Stefan Banach was a Polish mathematician who is generally considered one of the 20th century's most important and influential mathematicians.

Stefan Banach was the founder of modern functional analysis, and an original member of the Lwow School of Mathematics.

Stefan Banach was a co-founder of the Lwow School of Mathematics, a school of thought comprising some of the most renowned Polish mathematicians of the interwar period.

Stefan Banach was born on 30 March 1892 at St Lazarus General Hospital in Krakow, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a Goral Roman Catholic family and was baptised by his father.

Unusually, Stefan Banach's surname was his mother's instead of his father's, though he received his father's given name, Stefan Banach.

Military regulations did not permit soldiers of Stefan Banach Greczek's rank to marry; he was a private and as the mother was too poor to support the child, the couple decided that he should be reared by family and friends.

Young Stefan Banach came to regard Franciszka as his foster mother and Maria as his older sister.

Later in life Stefan Banach credited Dr Kamil Kraft, the mathematics and physics teacher at the school, with kindling his interests in mathematics.

Stefan Banach initially chose engineering as his field of study since at the time he was convinced that there was nothing new to discover in mathematics.

When World War I broke out, Stefan Banach was excused from military service due to his left-handedness and poor vision.

Stefan Banach made his living as a tutor at the local schools, worked in a bookstore and as a foreman of a road building crew.

In 1916, in Krakow's Planty park, Stefan Banach encountered Professor Hugo Steinhaus, one of the renowned mathematicians of the time.

Stefan Banach solved them within a week and the two soon published their first joint work.

Young and talented, Stefan Banach gathered around him a large group of mathematicians.

Around that time, Stefan Banach began working on his best-known work, the first monograph on the general theory of linear-metric space.

In 17 June 1924, Stefan Banach become a correspondence member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts in Krakow.

However, because the Soviets were deporting Poles from annexed formerly Polish eastern territories, Stefan Banach began preparing to leave the city and settle in Krakow, Poland, where he had been promised a chair at the Jagiellonian University.

Stefan Banach was considered a candidate for Minister of Education of Poland.

Stefan Banach's dissertation, completed in 1920 and published in 1922, formally axiomatized the concept of a complete normed vector space and laid the foundations for the area of functional analysis.

The theory of what came to be known as Stefan Banach spaces had antecedents in the work of the Hungarian mathematician Frigyes Riesz and contemporaneous contributions from Hans Hahn and Norbert Wiener.

Likewise, Stefan Banach's fixed point theorem, based on earlier methods developed by Charles Emile Picard, was included in his dissertation, and was later extended by his students and other mathematicians.

Since 2009, the International Stefan Banach Prize has been conferred by the Polish Mathematical Society to mathematicians for best doctoral dissertations in the mathematical sciences with the objective to "promote and financially support the most promising young researchers".

In 2001, a minor planet 16856 Stefan Banach, discovered by Paul Comba in 1997, was named after him.

In 2022, Google Doodle commemorated the 100th anniversary of Stefan Banach receiving his title of professor.