[ExI] two years in the slammer for blammisphy?

Wed May 12 17:44:51 UTC 2010

On Tue, 11 May 2010, spike wrote:

> 
> ... 
> > > But the Poles now seem to have a successful handle on their economy 
> > > and are will known for their scientific and literary 
> > contributions to the world.
> > 
> > Yes we do. Thanks for noticing. :-)... Regards, Tomasz Rola
> 
> Tomasz, I wonder if it is commonly taught in Poland the extraordinary
> contributions in the field of mathematics made by Poles and nearby eastern
> Europeans in the critical decades of the 1920s and 1930s.

Well, I feel there was a tendency in Poland (albeit I cannot tell how 
strong) to downplay our achievements and tout about whatever came from 
abroad (like, not only Soviet Union but US, Germany and so on). I now have 
a feeling this tendency has been reversed a bit, thanks to the internet 
it is easy to find information. However, one is still required to *want* 
to find them. I'm not sure how this is resolved in our schools nowadays, 
but I hope all is going ok. People of ages 30-50, however, well, they may 
lack this knowledge. But, whoever wants to learn, can find it. These 
things are mentioned quite a lot in tv and radio, so any curious mind will 
sooner or later get exposed.

Myself, I have for the first time heard about it while I was still 
attending school, which was about 20 years ago. I was amused how 
mathematicians gathered in a Scottish Cafe and wrote on a table tops. I 
was amused that they choose to go into a coffeehouse, amidst other people 
and discuss their things there. I think it got me somewhat directed into 
having ongoing fascination with maths.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_CafĂŠ

>  I read it *I
> think* in Stanislaw Ulam's book, where he explained that in those years,
> many of the world's top minds in mathematics were in Poland.  Specifically
> the Polish Jews were making so many critical breakthroughs in algebraic
> topology, ergodic theory and other fields, which would later contribute in
> the making of the atomic bomb, in artillery, in signaling and coding, and
> even in computer programming.

Actually, I tend to think of them all as Poles. Whether they were Jews or 
not, or someone else, is sometimes dependent on their own personal claims 
and sometimes is more complicated. Consider Hugo Steinhaus, for example.

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Steinhaus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Steinhaus

While he indeed seems to be born into Jewish family, and had to hide 
himself during WW2, he is buried on a Roman-Catholic cemetery, along with 
his (probably) wife. So, a Jew or not a Jew? I do not care. He was a Pole. 
Unless he himself stated otherwise, in which case, of course, his will is 
going to be respected.

http://cmentarze-polskie.pl/smetna/viewpage.php?page_id=25

As of our contributions, there were many of them and not only in 
mathematics. We had other scientists, too. And engineers. And sometimes, a 
mathematician could make some strange looking device:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=a7xcAAAAEBAJ

All of this stems from our Positivistic Movement, which started about 50 
years earlier. I guess you might find it interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism_in_Poland

I think we were quite close to building the first computer (as we have 
built devices to automate code breaking, we would have probably moved on 
with them). AFAIK, nobody actually had such an idea, but it could have 
happen as logical step forward as needs had been growing. Cryptography is 
a demanding beast.

Maths was the one requiring less resources than other sciences (well, a 
coffee cup, sugar cube, a pencil and a wall or a table top ;-) ). In a 
rather poor country that Poland was, this was an important issue.

It needs to be said, however, that our elites had excellent teachers, that 
were world's greatest minds of the time (like, in case of math, Hilbert 
and Klein, for example).

> In Ulam's book somewhere, which I read a long time ago (so I might be
> mistaken), he commented that so much of the real progress in mathematics in
> those decades came from Polish Jews that it surprised them whenever someone
> outside that exclusive circle made any major contribution.  My hazy memory
> has it that they had a saying, or a jingle or a rhyme, in a Polish-ized
> dialect of Yiddish, which roughly translates "The gentiles are said to have
> discovered a theorem.  Indeed, the gentiles?  Is this true?"
> 
> I did get a laugh out of it, imagining my distant cousins saying something
> like that. 

This sounds nicely, but a quick look at names gives another truth more 
compelling. Something along the lines "gentiles did all right, too" - at 
least in Poland. Did I say that we used to be a multicultural society?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LwĂłw_School_of_Mathematics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KrakĂłw_School_of_Mathematics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_School_of_Mathematics

However, more than diminishing someone, I am more for including all 
winners in a simply "winners" cathegory. They were all great people. 
Unfortunately, during WW2 a lot of them have been killed (either by 
Nazis or by Soviets). The efforts of both sides seem to be somewhat 
coordinated, although I don't know if Soviets used any name for their 
wrongdoings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_Action
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union_(after_1939)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Contrary to the popular belief, Nazis had targetted not only Jews (they 
also killed politicians and scientiststs, but actually all elites, even 
athletes, and did exterminate a lot of so called ethnic Poles as well as 
so called ethnic Jews) and Soviets had targetted not only Poles (they also 
used to murder Jews, Ukrainians and people of other nationalities, because 
they were Polish officers or other important Polish figures).

Those who managed to survive the war, sometimes died from war related 
stress and poor living conditions not long after it.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **