The Scottish Café ( pl, Kawiarnia Szkocka) was a café in Lwów,

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

(now Lviv,

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

) where, in the 1930s and 1940s, mathematicians from the

Lwów School of Mathematics The Lwów school of mathematics ( pl, lwowska szkoła matematyczna) was a group of Polish mathematicians who worked in the interwar period in Lwów, Poland (since 1945 Lviv, Ukraine). The mathematicians often met at the famous Scottish Café to ...

collaboratively discussed research problems, particularly in

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (e.g. inner product, norm, topology, etc.) and the linear functions defined o ...

and

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing ...

Stanisław Ulam Stanisław Marcin Ulam (; 13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish-American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapon ...

recounts that the tables of the café had

marble Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals, most commonly calcite or dolomite. Marble is typically not foliated (layered), although there are exceptions. In geology, the term ''marble'' refers to metamorphose ...

tops, so they could write in pencil, directly on the table, during their discussions. To keep the results from being lost, and after becoming annoyed with their writing directly on the table tops,

Stefan Banach Stefan Banach ( ; 30 March 1892 – 31 August 1945) was a Polish mathematician who is generally considered one of the 20th century's most important and influential mathematicians. He was the founder of modern functional analysis, and an origina ...

's wife provided the mathematicians with a large notebook, which was used for writing the problems and answers and eventually became known as the '' Scottish Book''. The book—a collection of solved, unsolved, and even probably unsolvable problems—could be borrowed by any of the guests of the café. Solving any of the problems was rewarded with prizes, with the most difficult and challenging problems having expensive prizes (during the Great Depression and on the eve of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

), such as a bottle of fine brandy. For problem 153, which was later recognized as being closely related to Stefan Banach's " basis problem",

Stanisław Mazur Stanisław Mieczysław Mazur (1 January 1905, Lwów – 5 November 1981, Warsaw) was a Polish mathematician and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Mazur made important contributions to geometrical methods in linear and nonlinear functio ...

offered the prize of a live goose. This problem was solved only in 1972 by

Per Enflo Per H. Enflo (; born 20 May 1944) is a Swedish mathematician working primarily in functional analysis, a field in which he solved mathematical problems, problems that had been considered fundamental. Three of these problems had been open problem, ...

, who was presented with the live goose in a ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland.Mauldin, ed.; Kaluza. The café building now houses the Szkocka Restaurant & Bar (named for the original Scottish Café) and the Atlas Deluxe hotel at the street address of 27

Taras Shevchenko Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko ( uk, Тарас Григорович Шевченко , pronounced without the middle name; – ), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, wr ...

Prospekt.

References

* *

External links

Scottish book

a

at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań website *
Manuscript of Scottish book (PDF)
*
Typescript of English version of Scottish book (PDF)

's review of "The Life of Stefan Banach"] {{Lviv History of Lviv History of mathematics History of education in Poland Coffeehouses and cafés in Poland Buildings and structures in Lviv Poland–Scotland relations

See also

References

External links