Hugo Dyonizy Steinhaus (English: HYOO-goh STYNE-howss, Polish: [ˈxuɡɔ ˈʂtajnxaws]; 14 January 1887 – 25 February 1972) was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering" mathematician Stefan Banach, with whom he gave a notable contribution to functional analysis through the Banach–Steinhaus theorem. After World War II Steinhaus played an important part in the establishment of the mathematics department at Wrocław University and in the revival of Polish mathematics from the destruction of the war. Author of around 170 scientific articles and books, Steinhaus has left his legacy and contribution in many branches of mathematics, such as functional analysis, geometry, mathematical logic, and trigonometry. Notably he is regarded as one of the early founders of game theory and probability theory, which led to later development of more comprehensive approaches by other scholars.
Early life and studies Steinhaus was born on January 14, 1887, in Jasło, Austria-Hungary to a family with Jewish roots. His father, Bogusław, was a local industrialist, owner of a brick factory and a merchant. His mother was Ewelina, née Lipschitz. Hugo's uncle, Ignacy Steinhaus, was a lawyer and an activist in the Koło Polskie (Polish Circle), and a deputy to the Galician Diet, the regional assembly of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.
Hugo finished his studies at the gymnasium in Jasło in 1905. His family wanted him to become an engineer but he was drawn to abstract mathematics and began to study the works of famous contemporary mathematicians on his own. In the same year he began studying philosophy and mathematics at the University of Lemberg. In 1906 he transferred to Göttingen University. At that University he received his Ph.D. in 1911, having written his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of David Hilbert. The title of his thesis was Neue Anwendungen des Dirichlet'schen Prinzips ("New applications to Dirichlet's principle"). At the start of World War I Steinhaus returned to Poland and served in Józef Piłsudski's Polish Legion, after which he lived in Kraków. He was an atheist.
Academic career
Interwar Poland During the 1916-1917 period and before Poland had regained its full independence, which occurred in 1918, Steinhaus worked in Kraków for the Ministry of the Interior in the ephemeral puppet state of Kingdom of Poland. In 1917 he started to work at the University of Lemberg (later Jan Kazimierz University in Poland) and acquired his habilitation qualification in 1920. In 1921 he became a profesor nadzwyczajny (associate professor) and in 1925 profesor zwyczajny (full professor) at the same university. During this time he taught a course on the then cutting edge theory of Lebesgue integration, one of the first such courses offered outside of France. While in Lwów, Steinhaus co-founded the Lwów School of Mathematics and was active in the circle of mathematicians associated with the Scottish cafe, although, according to Stanislaw Ulam, for the circle's gatherings, Steinhaus would have generally preferred a more upscale tea shop down the street.
World War II
In September 1939, after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded and occupied Poland, as a fulfillment of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact they had signed earlier, Lwów initially came under Soviet occupation. Steinhaus considered escaping to Hungary but ultimately decided to remain in Lwów. The Soviets reorganized the university to give it a more Ukrainian character, but they did appoint Stefan Banach (Steinhaus's student) as the dean of the mathematics department, and Steinhaus resumed teaching there. The faculty of the department at the school were also strengthened by several Polish refugees from German-occupied Poland. According to Steinhaus, during the experience of this period, he "acquired an insurmountable physical disgust in regard to all sorts of Soviet administrators, politicians and commissars." During the interwar period and the time of the Soviet occupation, Steinhaus contributed ten problems to the famous Scottish Book, including the last one, recorded shortly before Lwów was captured by the Nazis in 1941, during Operation Barbarossa. Steinhaus, because of his Jewish background, spent the Nazi occupation in hiding, first among friends in Lwów, then in the small towns of Osiczyna, near Zamość, and Berdechów, near Kraków. The Polish anti-Nazi resistance provided him with false documents of a forest ranger who had died sometime earlier, by the name of Grzegorz Krochmalny. Under this name he taught clandestine classes (higher education was forbidden for Poles under the German occupation). Worried about the possibility of imminent death if captured by Germans, Steinhaus, without access to any scholarly material, reconstructed from memory and recorded all the mathematics he knew, in addition to writing other voluminous memoirs, of which only a little part has been published. Also while in hiding, and cut off from reliable news on the course of the war, Steinhaus devised a statistical means of estimating for himself the German casualties at the front based on sporadic obituaries published in the local press. The method relied on the relative frequency with which the obituaries stated that the soldier who died was someone's son, someone's "second son", someone's "third son" and so on. According to his student and biographer, Mark Kac, Steinhaus told him that the happiest day of his life were the twenty-four hours between the time that the Germans had left occupied Poland and the Soviets had not yet arrived ("They had left, and they had not yet come").
After World War II
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