Edward Marczewski

Edward Marczewski (* November 15, 1907 in Warsaw, † October 17, 1976 in Wrocław ) was a Polish mathematician. His last name was until 1940 Szpilrajn.

He was a member of the Warsaw School of Mathematics. His life and his work after the Second World War were connected to Breslau, where he was one of the founders of the Polish science center.

Marczewski studied from 1925 at the University of Warsaw, where he was a pupil of Kazimierz Kuratowski, Waclaw Sierpinski and Stefan Mazurkiewicz. In 1932 he received his doctorate in Sierpinski. When German troops invaded Poland in 1939 he was a visiting scientist in Lviv, but soon returned to Warsaw. End of the war he was in a labor camp in Breslau until the liberation by Soviet troops. He stayed in Breslau and built there as professor of mathematics with Hugo Steinhaus and others new to the Mathematical Institute. There the lecture operations began in November 1945. At times, Marczewski was rector of the university.

In 1946 he founded the magazine Colloquium Mathematicum, whose editor he was thirty years. He was Secretary General of the Polish Mathematical Institute founded in 1948.

Marczewskis fields of interest were measure theory, descriptive set theory, topological geometry, probability theory and algebra. He also published writings on the analysis of real and complex numbers, to applied mathematics and mathematical logic. The set of Marczewski - Szpilrajn bears his name.

A conjecture of Marczewski on Banach Tarski decompositions of 1930 was proved in 1990 by Matthew Foreman and Randall Dougherty.

Initially, he also published under the name Szpilrajn and Szpilrajn - Marczewski ( he took a Jew to a Polish name and had a while his maiden name as a double name lead ).