Adventures of a Mathematician

Chapter 1. Childhood

My father, Jozef Ulam, was a lawyer. He was born in Lwów, Poland, in 1877. At the time of his birth the city was the capital of the province of Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When I was born in 1909 this was still true.

His father, my grandfather, was an architect and a building contractor. I understand that my great-grandfather had come to Lwów from Venice.

My mother, Anna Auerbach, was born in Stryj, a small town some sixty miles south of Lwów, near the Carpathian Mountains. Her father was an industrialist who dealt in steel and represented factories in Galicia and Hungary.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on a window sill with my father and looking out at a street on which there was a great parade honoring the Crown Prince, who was visiting Lwów. I was not quite three years old.

I remember when my sister was born. I was told a little girl had arrived, and I felt — it is hard to describe — somehow grown up. I was three.

When I was four, I remember jumping around on an oriental rug looking down at its intricate patterns. I remember my father’s towering figure standing beside me, and I noticed that he smiled. I felt, “He smiles because he thinks I am childish, but I know these are curious patterns.” I did not think in those very words, but I am pretty certain that it was not a thought that came to me later. I definitely felt, “I know something my father does not know. Perhaps I know better than my father.”

I also have the memory of a trip to Venice with the family. We were on a vaporetto on a canal, and I had a balloon which fell overboard. As it bobbed along the side of the boat, my father tried to fish it out with the crooked end of his walking stick but failed. I was consoled by being allowed to select a souvenir model of a gondola made of Venetian beads and still remember the feeling of pride at being given such a task.

I remember the beginning of the first World War. As a boy, I was a Central Powers patriot when Austria, Germany, and Bulgaria — the “Central Powers” — were fighting against France, England, Russia, and Italy. Most of the Polish-speaking people were nationalistic and anti-Austrian, but nevertheless, at about the age of eight I wrote a little poem about the great victories of the Austrian and German armies.

Early in 1914, the Russian troops advanced into Galicia and occupied Lwów. My family left, taking refuge in Vienna. There I learned German, but my native language — the language we spoke at home — was Polish.

We lived in a hotel across from St. Stephen’s cathedral. The strange thing is that even though I visited Vienna many times afterwards, I did not actually recognize this building again until one day in 1966 while I was walking through the streets with my wife. Perhaps because we were talking about my childhood I suddenly remembered it and pointed it out to her. With this a number of other memories buried for over fifty years surfaced.

On the same visit, while walking through the Prater gardens, the sight of an outdoor café suddenly brought back the memory of how I had once choked in the wind with a sort of asthmatic reaction in front of that very café—a feeling that I was not to experience again until many years later in Madison, Wisconsin. Curiously the subsequent sensation did not make me recall the childhood episode. It is only when I was at that very spot many years later that this sensory memory returned as a result of the visual association.

I will not try to describe the mood of Vienna as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old. I wore a sort of military cap; when an officer saluted me on Kärntner Strasse (one of the main streets of Vienna) I remember vividly that I was absolutely delighted. But when somebody mentioned that the United States would have ten thousand airplanes (there was such a rumor) I began to have doubts about the victory of the Central Powers.

At about this time in Vienna I learned to read. Like so much of learning throughout my life, at first it was an unpleasant — a difficult, somewhat painful experience. After a while, everything fell into place and became easy. I remember walking the streets reading all the signs aloud with great pleasure, probably annoying my parents.

My father was an officer in the Austrian Army attached to military headquarters, and we traveled frequently. For a while we lived in Märisch Ostrau, and I went to school there for a time. In school we had to learn the multiplication tables, and I found learning arithmetic mildly painful. Once I was kept home with a cold just as we were at six times seven. I was sure that the rest of the class would be at twelve times fifteen by the time I went back. I think I went to ten times ten by myself. The rest of the time I had tutors, for we traveled so much it was not possible to attend school regularly.

I also remember how my father would sometime read to me from a children’s edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Episodes that now seem only mildly funny to me, I considered hilarious. I thought the description of Don Quixote’s fight with the windmills the funniest thing imaginable.

These are visual pictures, not nostalgic really but bearing a definite taste, and they leave a definite flavor of associations in the memory. They carry with them a consciousness of different intensities, different colors, different compositions, mixed with feelings which are not explicit — of well-being or of doubt. They certainly play simultaneously on many physically separate parts in the brain and produce a feeling perhaps akin to a melody. It is a reconstruction of how I felt. People often retain these random pictures, and the strange thing is that they persist throughout one’s life.

Certain scenes are easier of access, but there are probably many other impressions which continue to exist: Experiments have re-created certain scenes from the past when areas of a patient’s brain were touched with a needle during an operation. The scenes that can be summoned up from one’s memory at will have a color or flavor which does not seem to change with time. Their re-creation by recollection does not seem to change them or refresh them. As far as I can tell when I try to observe in myself the chain of syllogisms initiated by these impressions, they are quite analogous now as to what they were when I was little. If I look now at an object, like a chair, or a tree, or a telegraph wire, it initiates a train of thought. And it seems to me that the succession of linked memories are quite the same as those I remember when I was five or six. When I look at a telegraph wire, I remember very well it gave me a sort of abstract or mathematical impulse. I wondered what else could do that. It was an attempt at generalization.

Perhaps the store of memory in the human brain is to a large extent already formed at a very early age, and external stimuli initiate a process of recording and classifying the impressions along channels which exist in large numbers in very early childhood.

To learn how things are filed in the memory, it obviously helps to analyze one’s thoughts. To understand how one understands a text, or a new method, or a mathematical proof, it is interesting to try to consciously perceive the temporal order and the inner logic. Professionals or even interested amateurs have not done enough in this area to judge by what I have read on the nature of memory. It seems to me that more could be done to elicit even in part the nature of associations, with computers providing the means for experimentation. Such a study would have to involve a gradation of notions, of symbols, of classes of symbols, of classes of classes, and so on, in the same way that the complexity of mathematical or physical structures is investigated.

There must be a trick to the train of thought, a recursive formula. A group of neurons starts working automatically, sometimes without external impulse. It is a kind of iterative process with a growing pattern. It wanders about in the brain, and the way it happens must depend on the memory of similar patterns.

Very little is known about this. Perhaps before a hundred years have passed this will all be part of a fascinating new science. It was not so long ago that scientists like John von Neumann began to examine analogies between the operation of the brain and that of the computer. Earlier, people had thought the heart was the seat of thought; then the role of the brain became more evident. Perhaps it actually depends on all the senses.

We are accustomed to think of thinking as a linear experience, as when we say “train” of thought. But subconscious thinking may be much more complicated. Just as one has simultaneous visual impressions on the retina, might there not be simultaneous, parallel, independently originated, abstract impressions in the brain itself? Something goes on in our heads in processes which are not simply strung out on one line. In the future, there might be a theory of a memory search, not by one sensor going around, but perhaps more like several searchers looking for someone lost in a forest. It is a problem of pursuit and of search — one of the greatest areas of combinatorics.

What happens when one suddenly remembers a forgotten word or name? What does one do when one tries to remember it? Subconsciously something is turning. More than one route is followed: one tries by sound or letters, long words or short words. That must mean that the word is filed in multiple storage. If it were only in one place there would be no way to recover it. Time is a parameter, too, and although in the conscious there seems to be only one time, there may be many in the subconscious. Then there is the mechanism of synthesizer or summarizer. Could one introduce an automatic search system, an ingenious system which does not go through everything but scans the relevant elements?

But I have digressed enough in these observations on memory. Let me now return to this account of my life. I only wish that I could have some of Vladimir Nabokov’s ability to evoke panoramas of memories from a few pictures of the past. Indeed one can say that an artist depicts the essential functions or properties of a whole set of impressions on the retina. It is these that the brain summarizes and stores in the memory, just as a caricaturist can convey the essentials of a face with just a few strokes. Mathematically speaking, these are the global characteristics of the function or the figure of a set of points. In this more prosaic account I will describe merely the more formal points.

In 1918 we returned to Lwów, which had become part of the newly formed Republic of Poland. In November of that year the, Ukrainians besieged the city, which was defended by a small number of Polish soldiers and armed civilians. Our house was in a relatively safe part of town, even though occasional artillery shells struck nearby. Because our house was safer, many of our relatives came to stay with us. There must have been some thirty of them, half being children. There were not nearly enough beds, of course, and I remember people sleeping everywhere on rolled rugs on the floor. During the shelling we had to go to the basement. I still remember insisting on tying my shoes while my mother was pressing me to hurry downstairs. For the adults it must have been a strenuous time to say the least, but not for us. Strangely enough, my memories of these days are of the fun I had playing, hiding, learning card games with the children for the two weeks before the siege was lifted with the arrival of another Polish army from France. This broke the ring of besiegers. For children wartime memories are not always traumatic.

During the Polish-Russian war in 1920 the city was threatened again. Budenny’s cavalry penetrated to within fifty miles, but Pilsudski’s victory on the Warsaw front saved the southern front and the war ended.

At the age of ten in 1919 I passed the entrance examination to the gymnasium. This was a secondary school patterned after the German gymnasia and the French lycées. Instruction usually took eight years. I was an A student, except in penmanship and drawing, but did not study much.

One of the gaps in my education was in chemistry. We did not have much of it in school and fifty years later, now that I am interested in biology, this handicaps me in my studies of elementary biochemistry.

About this time I also discovered that I did not have quite normal binocular vision. It happened in the following way: the boys in the class had been lined up for an eye examination. Awaiting my turn to read the charts, I covered my eyes with my hand. I noticed with horror that I could only read the largest letters with my right eye. This made me afraid that I would be kept after school, so I memorized the letters. I think it was the first time in my life when I consciously cheated. When my turn came I ’’read” satisfactorily and was let off, but I knew my eyes were different, one was myopic. The other, normal, later became presbyotic. This condition, rather rare but well known, is apparently hereditary. I still have never worn glasses, although I have to bend close to the printed text to read with my myopic eye. I am not normally aware which eye I use; once later in life a doctor in Madison told me that this condition is sometimes better than normal, for one or the other eye is resting while the other is in use. I wonder if my peculiar eyesight, in addition to affecting my reading habits, may also have affected my habits of thought.

When I try to remember how I started to develop my interest in science I have to go back to certain pictures in a popular book on astronomy I had. It was a textbook called Astronomy of Fixed Stars, by Martin Ernst, a professor of astronomy at the University of Lwów. In it was a reproduction of a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton. I was nine or ten at the time, and at that age a child does not react consciously to the beauty of a face. Yet I remember distinctly that I considered this portrait — especially the eyes — as something marvelous. A mixture of physical attraction and a feeling of the mysterious emanated from his face. Later I learned it was the Geoffrey Kneller portrait of Newton as a young man, with hair to his shoulders and an open shirt. Other illustrations I distinctly remember were of the rings of Saturn and of the belts of Jupiter. These gave me a certain feeling of wonder, the flavor of which is hard to describe since it is sometimes associated with nonvisual impressions such as the feeling one gets from an exquisite example of scientific reasoning. But it reappears, from time to time, even in older age, just as a familiar scent will reappear. Occasionally an odor will come back, bringing coincident memories of childhood or youth.

Reading descriptions of astronomical phenomena today brings back to me these visual memories, and they reappear with a nostalgic (not melancholy but rather pleasant) feeling, when new thoughts come about or a new desire for mental work suddenly emerges.

The high point of my interest in astronomy and an unforgettable emotional experience came when my uncle Szymon Ulam gave me a little telescope. It was one of the copper- or bronze-tube variety and, I believe, a refractor with a two-inch objective.

To this day, whenever I see an instrument of this kind in antique shops, nostalgia overcomes me, and after all these decades my thoughts still turn to visions of the celestial wonders and new astronomical problems.

At that time, I was intrigued by things which were not well understood — for example, the question of the shortening of the period of Encke’s comet. It was known that this comet irregularly and mysteriously shortens its three-year period of motion around the sun. Nineteenth-century astronomers made several attempts to account for this as being caused by friction or by the presence of some new invisible body in space. It excited me that nobody really knew the answer. I speculated whether the 1/r² law of attraction of Newton was not quite exact. I tried to imagine how it could affect the period of the comet if the exponent was slightly different from 2, imagining what the result would be at various distances. It was an attempt to calculate, not by numbers and symbols, but by almost tactile feelings combined with reasoning, a very curious mental effort.

No star could be large enough for me. Betelgeuse and Antares were believed to be much larger than the sun (even though at the time no precise data were available) and their distances were given, as were parallaxes of many stars. I had memorized the names of constellations and the individual Arabic names of stars and their distances and luminosities. I also knew the double stars.

In addition to the exciting Ernst book another, entitled Planets and the Conditions of Life on Them, was strange. Soon I had some eight or ten astronomy books in my library, including the marvelous Newcomb-Engelmann Astronomie in German. The Bode-Titius formula or “law” of planetary distances also fascinated me, inspiring me to become an astronomer or physicist. This was about the time when, at the age of eleven or so, I inscribed my name in a notebook, “S. Ulam, astronomer, physicist and mathematician.” My love for astronomy has never ceased; I believe it is one of the avenues that brought me to mathematics.

From today’s perspective Lwów may seem to have been a provincial city, but this is not so. Frequent lectures by scientists were held for the general public, in which such topics as new discoveries in astronomy, the new physics and the theory of relativity were covered. These appealed to lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and other laymen.

Other popular lecture topics were Freud and psychoanalysis. Relativity theory was, of course, much more difficult.

Around 1919–1920 so much was written in newspapers and magazines about the theory of relativity that I decided to find out what it was all about. I went to some of the popular talks on relativity. I did not really understand any of the details, but I had a good idea of the main thrust of the theory. Almost like learning a language in childhood, one develops the ability to speak it without knowing anything about grammar. Curiously enough, it is possible even in the exact sciences to have an idea of the gist of something without having a complete understanding of the basics. I understood the schema of special relativity and even some of its consequences without being able to verify the details mathematically. I believe that so-called understanding is not a yes-or-no proposition. But we don’t yet have the technique of defining these levels or the depth of the knowledge of reasons.

This interest became known among friends of my father, who remarked that I “understood” the theory of relativity. My father would say, “The little boy seems to understand Einstein!” This gave me a reputation I felt I had to maintain, even though I knew that I did not genuinely understand any of the details. Nevertheless, this was the beginning of my reputation as a “bright child.” This encouraged me to further study of popular science books — an experience I am sure is common to many children who later grow up to be scientists.

How a child acquires the habits and interests which play such a decisive role in determining his future has not been sufficiently investigated. “Plagiarism” — the mysterious ability of a child to imitate or copy external impressions such as the mother’s smile — is one possible explanation. Another is inborn curiosity: why does one seek new experiences instead of merely reacting to stimuli?

Inclinations may be part of the inherited system of connections in the brain, a genetic trait that may not even depend on the physical arrangement of neurons. Apparently headaches are related to the ease with which blood circulates in the brain, which depends on whether the blood vessels are wide or narrow. Perhaps it is the “plumbing” that is important, rather than the arrangement of the neurons normally associated with the seat of thinking.

Another determining factor may be initial accidents of success or failure in a new pursuit. I believe that the quality of memory develops similarly as a result of initial accidents, random external influences, or a lucky combination of the two.

Consider the talent for chess, for example. José Capablanca learned the game at the age of six by watching his father and uncle play. He developed the ability to play naturally, effortlessly, the way a child learns to speak as compared with the struggles adults have in learning new subjects. Other famous chess players also first became interested by watching their relatives play. When they tried, perhaps a chance initial success encouraged them to pursue. Nothing succeeds like success, it is well known, especially in early youth.

I learned chess from my father. He had a little paper-bound book on the subject and used to tell me about some of the famous games it described. The moves of the knight fascinated me, especially the way two enemy pieces can be threatened simultaneously with one knight. Although it is a simple stratagem, I thought it was marvelous, and I have loved the game ever since.

Could the same process apply to the talent for mathematics? A child by chance has some satisfying experiences with numbers; then he experiments further and enlarges his memory by building up his store of experiences.

I had mathematical curiosity very early. My father had in his library a wonderful series of German paperback books — Reklam, they were called. One was Euler’s Algebra. I looked at it when I was perhaps ten or eleven, and it gave me a mysterious feeling. The symbols looked like magic signs; I wondered whether one day I could understand them. This probably contributed to the development of my mathematical curiosity. I discovered by myself how to solve quadratic equations. I remember that I did this by an incredible concentration and almost painful and not-quite-conscious effort. What I did amounted to completing the square in my head without paper or pencil.

In high school, I was stimulated by the notion of the problem of the existence of odd perfect numbers. An integer is perfect if it is equal to the sum of all its divisors including one but not itself. For instance: 6 = 1 + 2 + 3 is perfect. So is 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14. You may ask: does there exist a perfect number that is odd? The answer is unknown to this day.

In general, the mathematics classes did not satisfy me. They were dry, and I did not like to have to memorize certain formal procedures. I preferred reading on my own.

At about fifteen I came upon a treatise on the infinitesimal calculus in a book by Gerhardt Kowalevski. I did not have enough preparation in analytic geometry or even in trigonometry, but the idea of limits, the definitions of real numbers, the notion of derivatives and integration puzzled and excited me greatly. I decided to read a page or two a day and attempt to learn the necessary facts about trigonometry and analytic geometry from other books.

I found two other books in a secondhand bookstore.

These intrigued and fascinated me more than anything else for many years to come: Sierpinski’s Theory of Sets and a monograph on number theory. At the age of seventeen I knew as much or more elementary number theory than I do now.

I also read a book by the mathematician Hugo Steinhaus entitled What Is and What Is Not Mathematics and in Polish translation Poincaré’s wonderful La Science et l’Hypothèse, La Science et la Méthode, La Valeur de la Science, and his Dernières Pensées. Their literary quality, not to mention the science, was admirable. Poincaré molded portions of my scientific thinking. Reading one of’ his books today demonstrates how many wonderful truths have remained, although everything in mathematics has changed almost beyond recognition and in physics perhaps even more so. I admired Steinhaus’s book almost as much, for it gave many examples of actual mathematical problems.

The mathematics taught in school was limited to algebra, trigonometry, and the very beginning of analytic geometry. In the seventh and eighth classes, where the students were sixteen and seventeen, there was a course on elementary logic and a survey of history of philosophy. The teacher, Professor Zawirski, was a real scholar, a lecturer at the University and a very stimulating man. He gave us glimpses of recent developments in advanced modern logic. Having studied Sierpinski’s books on the side, I was able to engage him in discussions of set theory during recess and in his office. I was working on some problems on transfinite numbers and on the problem of the continuum hypothesis.

I also engaged in wild mathematical discussions, formulating vast and new projects, new problems, theories and methods bordering on the fantastic, with a boy named Metzger, some three or four years my senior. He had been directed toward me by friends of’ my father who knew that he too had a great interest in mathematics. Metzger was short, rotund, blondish, a typical liberated ghetto Jew. Later I saw a youthful portrait of Heine which reminded me of his face. People of his type can still be found occasionally. They exhibit amateurism, even about the very foundations of arithmetic. We discussed “an iterative calculus” on the basis of practically no knowledge of the existing mathematical material. He was “crazy” and full of the urge to innovate which is so Jewish. Stefan Banach once pointed out that it is characteristic of certain Jews always to try to change the established scheme of things — Jesus, Marx, Freud, Cantor. On a very small scale Metzger showed this tendency. Had he had a better education he might have done good things. He obviously came from a very poor family and his Polish had a strong, guttural accent. After a few months he abruptly vanished from my ken. This is the first time I have thought about him in all these years. Perhaps he is alive. This memory of Metzger and our discussions brings back the very smell and color of the “abstractions” we exchanged.

Strangely enough, at this youthful and immature age I was also occasionally trying to analyze my own thinking processes. I tried to make myself more aware of them by periodically going back every few seconds to see what it was that molded the train of thought. Needless to say, I was fully aware of the fact that there is a danger in indulging too much and too frequently in such introspection.

So far, the image I had formed of astronomers and scientists, and of mathematicians in particular, came almost exclusively from my reading. I got my first “live” impressions when I went to a series of popular mathematics lectures in 1926. On successive days there were talks by Hugo Steinhaus, Stanislaw Ruziewicz, Stefan Banach, and perhaps others. My first surprise was to discover how young they were. Having heard and read of their achievements I really expected bearded old scholars. I listened avidly to their talks. Young as I was, my impression of Banach was that here was a homespun genius. This first impression — deepened, enriched, and transformed, of course — remained during my subsequent long acquaintance, collaboration, and friendship with him.

Then in 1927, Zawirski told me a congress of mathematicians was to take place in Lwów and foreign scholars had been invited. He added that a youthful and extremely brilliant mathematician named John von Neumann was to give a lecture. This was the first time I heard the name. Unfortunately, I could not attend these lectures for I was in the midst of my own matriculation examinations at the Gymnasium.

Still, my interests in science did not take all of my time. I avidly read Polish literature, as well as writers as diverse as Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Karl May, H. G. Wells, and Anatole France. As a boy I preferred biographies and adventure stories.

Besides these more cerebral activities, I engaged actively in sports. Beginning at about fourteen I played various positions in soccer with my classmates: goalie, right forward and others. I started playing tennis, too, and was active in track and field.

After school I played cards with my classmates. We played bridge and a simple variety of poker for small stakes. In poker the older boys won most of the time. One of the abilities that apparently does not decrease but rather improves with age is a primitive type of elementary shrewdness. I played chess also, two or three times a week. Although I don’t think I ever had too much talent for the game, I certainly had a more than average feeling for positions, and I probably was one of the best players in my group. Like mathematics, chess is one of the things where constant practice, constant thinking, and imagining, and studying are necessary to achieve a mastery of the game.

In 1927 I passed my three day matriculation examinations and a period of indecision began. The choice of a future career was not easy. My father, who had wanted me to become a lawyer so I could take over his large practice, now recognized that my inclinations lay in other directions. Besides, there was no shortage of lawyers in Lwów. The thought of a university career was attractive, but professorial positions were rare and hard to obtain, especially for people with Jewish backgrounds like myself. Consequently, I looked for a course of studies which would lead to something practical and at the same time would be connected with science. My parents urged me to become an engineer, and so I applied for admission at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute as a student of either mechanical or electrical engineering.

Chapter 2. Student Years

In the fall of 1927 I began attending lectures at the Polytechnic Institute in the Department of General Studies, because the quota of Electrical Engineering already was full. The level of the instruction was obviously higher than that at high school, but having read Poincaré and some special mathematical treatises, I naively expected every lecture to be a masterpiece of style and exposition. Of course, I was disappointed.

As I knew many of the subjects in mathematics from my studies, I began to attend a second-year course as an auditor. It was in set theory and given by a young professor fresh from Warsaw, Kazimir Kuratowski, a student of Sierpinski, Mazurkiewicz, and Janiszewski. He was a freshman professor, so to speak, and I a freshman student. From the very first lecture I was enchanted by the clarity, logic, and polish of his exposition and the material he presented. From the beginning I participated more actively than most of the older students in discussions with Kuratowski, since I knew something of the subject from having read Sierpinski’s book. I think he quickly noticed that I was one of the better students; after class he would give me individual attention. This is how I started on my career as a mathematician, stimulated by Kuratowski.

Soon I could answer some of the more difficult questions in the set theory course, and I began to pose other problems. Right from the start I appreciated Kuratowski’s patience and generosity in spending so much time with a novice. Several times a week I would accompany him to his apartment at lunch time, a walk of about twenty minutes, during which I asked innumerable mathematical questions. Years later, Kuratowski told me that the questions were sometimes significant, often original, and interesting to him.

My courses included mathematical analysis, calculus, classical mechanics, descriptive geometry, and physics. Between classes, I would sit in the offices of some of the mathematics instructors. At that time I was perhaps more eager than at any other time in my life to do mathematics to the exclusion of almost any other activity.

It was there that I first met Stanislaw Mazur, who was a young assistant at the University. He came to the Polytechnic Institute to work with Orlics, Nikliborc and Kaczmarz, who were a few years his senior.

In conversations with Mazur I began to learn about problems in analysis. I remember long hours of sitting at a desk and thinking about the questions which he broached to me and discussed with the other mathematicians. Mazur introduced me to advanced ideas of real variable function theory and the new functional analysis. We discussed some of the more recent problems of Banach, who had developed a new approach to this theory.

Banach himself would appear occasionally, even though his main work was at the University. I met him during this first year, but our acquaintance began in a more meaningful, intimate, and intellectual sense a year or two later.

Several other mathematicians could frequently be seen in these offices. Stozek, cheerful, rotund, short, and completely bald, was Chairman of the Department of General Studies. The word stozek means ’’a cone” in Polish; he looked more like a sphere. Always in good humor and joking incessantly, he loved to consume frankfurters liberally smeared with horseradish, a dish which he maintained cured melancholy. (Stozek was one of the professors murdered by the Germans in 1941.)

Antoni Lomnicki, a mathematician of aristocratic features who specialized in probability theory and its applications to cartography, had office hours in these rooms. (He too was murdered by the Germans in Lwów in 1941.) His nephew, Zbigniew Lomnicki, later became my good friend and mathematical collaborator.

Kaczmarz, tall and thin (who later was killed in military service in 1940), and Nikliborc, short and rotund, managed the exercise sections of the large calculus and differential equations courses. They were often seen together and reminded me of Pat and Patachon, two contemporary comic film actors.

I did not feel I was a regular student in the sense that one may have to study subjects one is not especially interested in. On the other hand, after all these years, I still do not feel much like an accomplished professional mathematician. I like to try new approaches and, being an optimist by nature, hope they will succeed. It has never occurred to me to question whether a mental effort will be wasted or whether to “husband” my mental capital.

At the beginning of the second semester of my freshman year, Kuratowski told me about a problem in set theory that involved transformations of sets. It was connected with a well-known theorem of Bernstein: if 2A = 2B, then A = B, in the arithmetic sense of infinite cardinals. This was the first problem on which I really spent arduous hours of thinking. I thought about it in a way which now seems mysterious to me, not consciously or explicitly knowing what I was aiming at. So immersed in some aspects was I, that I did not have a conscious overall view. Nevertheless, I managed to show by means of a construction how to solve the problem, devising a method of representing by graphs the decomposition of sets and the corresponding transformations. Unbelievably, at the time I thought I had invented the very idea of graphs.

I wrote my first paper on this in English, which I knew better than German or French. Kuratowski checked it and the short paper appeared in 1928 in Fundamenta Mathematicae, the leading Polish mathematical journal which he edited. This gave me self-confidence.

I still was not certain what career or course of work I should pursue. The practical chances of becoming a professor of mathematics in Poland were almost nil — there were few vacancies at the University. My family wanted me to learn a profession, and so I intended to transfer to the Department of Electrical Engineering for my second year. In this field the chance of making a living seemed much better.

Before the end of the year Kuratowski mentioned in a lecture another problem in set theory. It was on the existence of set functions which are “subtractive” but not completely countably additive. I remember pondering the question for weeks. I can still feel the strain of thinking and the number of attempts I had to make. I gave myself an ultimatum. If I could solve this problem, I would continue as a mathematician. If not, I would change to electrical engineering.

After a few weeks I found a way to achieve a solution. I ran excitedly to Kuratowski and told him about my solution, which involved transfinite induction. Transfinite induction had been used by mathematical workers many times in other connections; however, I believe that the way in which I used it was novel.

I think Kuratowski took pleasure in my success, encouraging me to continue in mathematics. Before the end of my first college year I had written my second paper, which Kuratowski presented to Fundamenta. Now, the die was cast. I began to concentrate on the “impractical” possibilities of an academic career. Most of what people call decision making occurs for definite reasons. However, I feel that for most of us what is ultimately called a “decision” is a sort of vote taken in the subconscious, in which the majority of the reasons favoring the decision win out.

During the summer of 1928 when I took a trip to the Baltic coast of Poland, Kuratowski invited me to visit him on the way at his summer place near Warsaw. It was an elegant villa with a tennis court. Kuratowski was quite good at tennis in those days, and this surprised me since his figure was anything but athletic.

On the six-hour train ride from Lwów to Warsaw I thought almost without interruption about problems in set theory with the idea of presenting something that would interest him. I was thinking of ways to disprove the continuum hypothesis, a famous unsolved problem in foundations of set theory and mathematics formulated by Georg Cantor, the creator of set theory. My presentation was vague, and Kuratowski soon detected this. Nevertheless, we discussed its ramifications, and so I went on to Zoppot with my self-confidence intact.

Alfred Tarski, now a celebrated logician and professor at Berkeley, was a friend of Kuratowski from Warsaw, who occasionally visited Lwów. He was already known internationally as a logician, but his work in the foundations of mathematical logic and set theory was also important. He had been a candidate for a chair of philosophy that was vacant at the University of Lwów. The chair went instead to another logician, Leon Chwistek, an accomplished painter and author of philosophical treatises, a brother-in-law of Steinhaus, and well known for many eccentricities. (He died in Moscow during the war.) Years later in Cambridge, I happened to mention Chwistek to Alfred North Whitehead. In the course of the conversation I said, “Very strange, he was a painter too!” Whereupon Whitehead laughed out loud, clapped his hands and exclaimed: “How British of you to say that being a painter is strange.” Mrs. Whitehead joined in the laughter. A very good biography of Chwistek by Estriecher has recently appeared in Poland. It is a fascinating account of the intellectual and artistic life of Cracow and Lwów from 1910 to 1946.

One of my early contacts with Tarski was a result of my second paper. In it I had proved a theorem on ideals of sets in set theory. (Marshall Stone later proved another version of this same theorem.) My note in Fundamenta also showed the possibility of defining a finitely additive measure with two values, 0 to 1, and established a maximum prime ideal for subsets in the infinite set. In a very long paper which appeared a year later, Tarski got the same result. After Kuratowski pointed out to him that it followed from my theorem, Tarski acknowledged this in a footnote. In view of my youth, this seemed to me a little victory — an acknowledgment of my mathematical presence.

There was a feeling among some mathematicians that logic is not “real” mathematics, but merely a preparatory and somewhat alien art. Today, this feeling is disappearing as a result of many concrete mathematical advances made by the methods of formal logic.

During the second year of studies I decided to audit a course in theoretical physics given by Professor Wojciech Rubinowicz, a leading Polish theoretician and a former student and collaborator of the famous Munich physicist Sommerfeld.

I attended his masterly lectures on electromagnetism and took part in a seminar he led on group theory and quantum theory for advanced students. We used Hermann Weyl’s Gruppen Theorie und Quantum Mechanik. It was impressive to see the high level of mathematics involved in the study of Maxwell’s equations and in the theory of electricity which made up its first part. Even though much of it was above my head technically, I managed to do a lot of reading on the side. I read popular accounts of theoretical physics in statistical mechanics, in the theory of gases and the theory of relativity, and on electricity and magnetism.

During the winter, Rubinowicz fell ill and asked me (although I was the youngest member of the class) to conduct a few sessions during his absence. I remember to this day how I struggled with the unfamiliar and difficult material of Weyl’s book. This was my first active participation in the area of physics.

The mathematics offices of the Polytechnic Institute continued to be my hangout. I spent mornings there, every day of the week, including Saturdays. (Saturdays were not considered to be part of the weekend then; classes were held on Saturday mornings.)

Mazur appeared often, and we started our active collaboration on problems of function spaces. We found a solution to a problem involving infinitely dimensional vector spaces. The theorem we proved — that a transformation preserving distances is linear — is now part of the standard treatment of the geometry of function spaces. We wrote a paper which was published in the Compte-Rendus of the French Academy.

It was Mazur (along with Kuratowski and Banach) who introduced me to certain large phases of mathematical thinking and approaches. From him I learned much about the attitudes and psychology of research. Sometimes we would sit for hours in a coffee house. He would write just one symbol or a line like y = f(x) on a piece of paper, or on the marble table top. We would both stare at it as various thoughts were suggested and discussed. These symbols in front of us were like a crystal ball to help us focus our concentration. Years later in America, my friend Everett and I often had similar sessions, but instead of a coffee house they were held in an office with a blackboard.

Mazur’s forte was making what he called “observations and remarks.” These stated — usually in a concise and precise form — some properties of notions. Once made, they were perhaps not so difficult to verify, for sometimes they were peripheral to the usual formulations and had gone unnoticed. They were often decisive in solving problems.

In a conversation in the coffee house, Mazur proposed the first examples of infinite mathematical games. I remember also (it must have been sometime in 1929 or 1930) that he raised the question of the existence of automata which would be able to replicate themselves, given a supply of some inert material. We discussed this very abstractly, and some of the thoughts which we never recorded were actually precursors of theories like that of von Neumann on abstract automata. We speculated frequently about the possibility of building computers which could perform exploratory numerical operations and even formal algebraical work.

I have mentioned that I first saw Banach at a series of mathematics lectures when I was in high school. He was then in his middle thirties, but contrary to the impression given to very young people by men fifteen or twenty years their senior, to me he appeared to be very youthful. He was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and rather heavy-set. His manner of speaking struck me as direct, forceful, and perhaps too simple-minded (a trait which I later observed was to some extent consciously forced). His facial expression was usually one of good humor mixed with a certain skepticism.

Banach came from a poor family, and he had very little conventional schooling at first. He was largely self-taught when he arrived at the Polytechnical Institute. It is said that Steinhaus accidentally discovered his talent when he overheard a mathematical conversation between two young students sitting on a park bench. One was Banach, the other Nikodym, now recently retired as professor of mathematics at Kenyon College. Banach and Steinhaus were to become the closest of collaborators and the founders of the Lwów school of mathematics.

Banach’s knowledge of mathematics was broad. His contributions were in the theory of functions of real variables, set theory and, above all, functional analysis, the theory of spaces of infinitely many dimensions (the points of these spaces being functions or infinite series of numbers). They include some of the most elegant results. He once told me that as a young man he knew the three volumes of Darboux’s Differential Geometry.

I attended only a few of Banach’s lectures. I especially remember some on the calculus of variations. In general, his lectures were not too well prepared; he would occasionally make mistakes or omissions. It was most stimulating to watch him work at the blackboard as he struggled and invariably managed to pull through. I have always found such a lecture more stimulating than the entirely polished ones where my attention would lapse completely and would revive only when I sensed that the lecturer was in difficulty.

Beginning with the third year of’ studies, most of my mathematical work was really started in conversations with Mazur and Banach. And according to Banach some of my own contributions were characterized by a certain “strangeness” in the formulation of’ problems and in the outline of possible proofs. As he told me once some years later, he was surprised how often these “strange” approaches really worked. Such a statement, coming from the great master to a young man of twenty-eight, was perhaps the greatest compliment I have received.

In mathematical discussions, or in short remarks he made on general subjects, one could feel almost at once the great power of his mind. He worked in periods of great intensity separated by stretches of apparent inactivity. During the latter his mind kept working on selecting the statements, the sort of alchemist’s probe stones that would best serve as focal theorems in the next field of study.

He enjoyed long mathematical discussions with friends and students. I recall a session with Mazur and Banach at the Scottish Café which lasted seventeen hours without interruption except for meals. What impressed me most was the way he could discuss mathematics, reason about mathematics, and find proofs in these conversations.

Since many of these discussions took place in neighborhood coffee houses or little inns, some mathematicians also dined there frequently. It seems to me now the food must have been mediocre, but the drinks were plentiful. The tables had white marble tops on which one could write with a pencil, and, more important, from which notes could be easily erased.

There would be brief spurts of conversation, a few lines would be written on the table, occasional laughter would come from some of the participants, followed by long periods of silence during which we just drank coffee and stared vacantly at each other. The café clients at neighboring tables must have been puzzled by these strange doings. It is such persistence and habit of concentration which somehow becomes the most important prerequisite for doing genuinely creative mathematical work.

Thinking very hard about the same problem for several hours can produce a severe fatigue, close to a breakdown. I never really experienced a breakdown, but have felt “strange inside” two or three times during my life. Once I was thinking hard about some mathematical constructions, one after the other, and at the same time trying to keep them all simultaneously in my mind in a very conscious effort. The concentration and mental effort put an added strain on my nerves. Suddenly things started going round and round, and I had to stop.

These long sessions in the cafés with Banach, or more often with Banach and Mazur, were probably unique. Collaboration was on a scale and with an intensity I have never seen surpassed, equaled or approximated anywhere — except perhaps at Los Alamos during the war years.

Banach confided to me once that ever since his youth he had been especially interested in finding proofs — that is, demonstrations of conjectures. He had a subconscious system for finding hidden paths — the hallmark of his special genius.

After a year or two Banach transferred our daily sessions from the Café Roma to the “Szkocka” (Scottish Café) just across the street. Stozek was there every day for a couple of hours, playing chess with Nikliborc and drinking coffee. Other mathematicians surrounded them and kibitzed.

Kuratowski and Steinhaus appeared occasionally. They usually frequented a more genteel teashop that boasted the best pastry in Poland.

It was difficult to outlast or outdrink Banach during these sessions. We discussed problems proposed right there, often with no solution evident even after several hours of thinking. The next day Banach was likely to appear with several small sheets of paper containing outlines of proofs he had completed in the meantime. If they were not polished or even not quite correct, Mazur would frequently put them in a more satisfactory form.

Needless to say such mathematical discussions were interspersed with a great deal of talk about science in general (especially physics and astronomy), university gossip, politics, the state of affairs in Poland; or, to use one of John von Neumann’s favorite expressions, the “rest of the universe.” The shadow of coming events, of Hitler’s rise in Germany, and the premonition of a world war loomed ominously.

Banach’s humor was ironical and sometimes tinged with pessimism. For a time he was dean of the Faculty of Science and had to attend various committee meetings. He tried to avoid all such activities, as much as he could, and once he told me, “Wiem gdzie nie bede [I know where I won’t be],” his way of saying that he did not intend to attend a dull meeting.

Banach’s faculty for proposing problems illuminating whole sections of mathematical disciplines was very great, and his publications reflect only a part of his mathematical powers. The diversity of his mathematical interests surpassed that shown in his published work. His personal influence on other mathematicians in Lwów and in Poland was very strong. He stands out as one of the main figures of this remarkable period between the wars when so much mathematical work was accomplished.

I have had no precise knowledge of his life and work from the outbreak of the war to his premature death in the fall of 1945. From fragments of information obtained later, we learned that he was still in Lwów during the German occupation and in miserable circumstances. Surviving to see the defeat of Germany, he died in 1945 of lung disease, probably cancer. I had often seen him smoke four or five packs of cigarettes in a day.

In 1929 Kuratowski asked me to participate in a Congress of Mathematicians from the Slavic Countries which was to take place in Warsaw. What sticks in my mind is a reception in the Palace of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers and my timidity at seeing so many great mathematicians, government officials, and important people. This was overcome somewhat when another mathematician, Aronszajn, who was four or five years older than I, said, “Kolego” (this was the way Polish mathematicians addressed each other), “let’s go to the other room, the pastry is very good there.” (He is now a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.)

The Lwów section of the Polish Mathematical Society held its meetings at the University most Saturday evenings. Usually three or four short papers were given during an hour or so, after which many of the participants repaired to the coffee house to continue the debates. Several times I announced beforehand that I had some results to communicate at one of these sessions when my proof was not complete. I felt confident, but I was also lucky, because I finished the proofs before I had to speak.

I was nineteen or twenty when Stozek asked me to become secretary of the Lwów Section, a job which mainly required sending announcements of meetings and writing up short abstracts of talks for the Society’s Bulletin. There was, of course, much correspondence between our section and the other sections in Cracow, Poznan, and Wilno. Important problems arose about transferring the administrative seat of the Society from Cracow, the ancient Polish royal city, to Warsaw, the capital, where the headquarters of the Society were eventually located. Needless to say this took a great deal of maneuvering and politicking.

One day a letter came from the Cracow center soliciting the support of the Lwów section. I told Stozek, who was the president of our section, ’’An important letter just arrived this morning.” His reply — “Hide it so no human eye will ever see it again” — was a great shock to my youthful innocence.

The second big congress I attended was held in Wilno in 1931. I went to Wilno by train via Warsaw with Stozek, Nikliborc, and one or two other mathematicians. They kept fortifying themselves with snacks and drinks, but when I pulled out a flask of brandy from my pocket, Stozek burst into laughter and said, “His mama gave it to him in case he should feel faint.” This made me acutely aware of how young I was in the eyes of others. For many years I was the youngest among my mathematical friends. It makes me melancholy to realize that I now have become the oldest in most groups of scientists.

Wilno was a marvelous city. Quite different from the cities of the Austrian part of Poland, it gave a definitely oriental impression. The whole city appeared exotic to me and much more primitive than my part of Poland. The streets were still paved with cobblestones. When I prepared to take a bath in my hotel room, the gigantic bathtub had no running water. When I rang the bell a sturdy fellow in Russian boots appeared with three large buckets of hot water to pour into the tub.

I visited the church of St. Ann, the one which Napoleon admired so much on his way to Moscow that he wanted to move it to France.

This was the first and last time I ever visited Wilno. I should mention here that one of the most prominent Polish mathematicians, Antoni Zygmund, was a professor there until World War II. He left via Sweden in 1940 to come to the United States and is now a professor at the University of Chicago.

At the Congress I gave a talk about the results obtained with Mazur on geometrical isometric transformations of Banach spaces, demonstrating that they are linear. Some of the additional remarks we made at the time are still unpublished. In general, the Lwów mathematicians were on the whole somewhat reluctant to publish. Was it a sort of pose or a psychological block? I don’t know. It especially affected Banach, Mazur, and myself, but not Kuratowski, for example.

Much of the historical development of mathematics has taken place in specific centers. These centers, large or small, have formed around a single person or a few individuals, and sometimes as a result of the work of a number of people — a group in which mathematical activity flourished. Such a group possesses more than just a community of interests; it has a definite mood and character in both the choice of interests and the method of thought. Epistemologically this may appear strange, since mathematical achievement, whether a new definition or an involved proof of a problem, may seem to be an entirely individual effort, almost like a musical composition. However, the choice of certain areas of interest is frequently the result of a community of interests. Such choices are often influenced by the interplay of questions and answers, which evolves much more naturally from the interplay of several minds. The great nineteenth-century centers such as Göttingen, Paris, and Cambridge (England) all exercised their own peculiar influence on the development of mathematics.

The accomplishments of the mathematicians in Poland between the two world wars constitute an important element in mathematical activity throughout the world and have set the tone of mathematical research in many areas.

This is due in part to the influence of Janiszewski, one of the organizers of Polish mathematics and a writer on mathematical education, who unfortunately died young. Janiszewski advocated that the new state of Poland specialize in well-defined areas rather than try to work in too many fields. His arguments were, first, that there were not many persons in Poland who could become involved, and second, that it was better to have a number of persons working in the same domain so they could have common interests and could stimulate each other in discussions. On the other hand, this reduced somewhat the scope and breadth of the investigations.

Although Lwów was a remarkable center for mathematics, the number of professors both at the Institute and at the University was extremely limited and their salaries were very small. People like Schauder had to teach in high school in order to supplement a meager income as lecturer or assistant. (Schauder was murdered by the Germans in 1943.) Zbigniew Lomnicki worked as an expert in probability theory in a government institute of statistics and insurance. If I had to name one quality which characterized the development of this school, made up of the mathematicians from the University and the Polytechnic Institute, I would say that it was their preoccupation with the heart of the matter that forms mathematics. By this I mean that if one considers mathematics as resembling a tree, the Lwów group was intent on the study of the roots and the trunk rather than the branches, twigs, and leaves. On a set theoretical and axiomatic basis we examined the nature of a general space, the general meaning of continuity, general sets of points in Euclidean space, general functions of real variables, a general study of the spaces of functions, a general idea of the notions of length, area and volume, that is to say, the concept of measure and the formulation of what should be called probability.

In retrospect it seems somewhat curious that the ideas of algebra were not considered in a similar general setting. It is equally curious that studies of the foundations of physics — in particular a study of space-time — have not been undertaken in such a spirit anywhere to this day.

Lwów had frequent and lively interaction with other mathematical centers, especially Warsaw. From Warsaw Sierpinski would come occasionally, so would Mazurkiewicz, Knaster, and Tarski. In Lwów they would give short talks at the meetings of the mathematical society on Saturday evenings. Sierpinski especially liked the informal Lwów atmosphere, the excursions to inns and taverns, and the gay drinking with Banach, Ruziewicz, and others. (Ruziewicz was murdered by the Germans on July 4, 1941.)

Mazurkiewicz once spent a semester lecturing in Lwów. Like Knaster in topology, he was a master at finding counter examples in analysis, examples showing that a conjecture is not true. His counter examples were sometimes very complicated, but always ingenious and elegant.

Sierpinski, with his steady stream of results in abstract set theory or in set theoretical topology, was always eager to listen to new problems — even minor ones — and to think about them seriously. Often he would send solutions back from Warsaw.

Bronislaw Knaster was tall, bald, very slim, with flashing dark eyes. He and Kuratowski published many papers together. He was really an amateur mathematician, very ingenious at the construction of sets of points and continua with pathological properties. He had studied medicine in Paris during the first World War. Being extremely witty, he used to entertain us with descriptions of the polyglot international group of students and the indescribable language they spoke. He quoted one student he had overheard in a restaurant as having said: “Kolego, pozaluite mnia ein stückele von diesem faschierten poisson,” an amalgam of Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German, and French!

Borsuk, more my contemporary, came for a longer visit from Warsaw. We started collaborating from the first. From him I learned about the truly geometric, more visual, almost “palpable” tricks and methods of topology. Our results were published in a number of papers which we sent to Polish journals and to some journals abroad. Actually my first publication in the United States appeared while I was in Lwów. It was a joint paper with Borsuk, published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. We defined the idea of “epsilon homeomorphisms” — approximate homeomorphisms — and the behavior of some topological invariants under such more general transformation’s — continuous ones, but not necessarily one to one. A joint paper on symmetric products introduced an idea that modifies the definition of a Cartesian product and leads to the construction of some curious manifolds. Some of these might one day find applications in physical theories. They correspond to the new statistics of counting the numbers of particles (not in the familiar classical sense, but rather in the spirit of quantum theory statistics of indistinguishable particles, or of particles obeying the Bose-Einstein or else Fermi-Dirac ways of counting their combinations and dispositions). These cannot be explained here; perhaps this mention will whet the curiosity of some readers.

Kuratowski and Steinhaus, each in a different way, represented elegance, rigor, and intelligence in mathematics. Kuratowski was really a representative of the Warsaw school which flourished almost explosively after 1920. He came to Lwów in 1927, preceded by a reputation for his work in pure set theory and axiomatic topology of general spaces. As editor of Fundamenta Mathematicae he organized and gave direction to much of the research in this famous journal. His mathematics was characterized by what I would call a Latin clarity. In the proliferation of mathematical definitions and interests (now even more bewildering than at that time), Kuratowski’s measured choice of problems had the quality of what is hard to define — common sense in the abstractions.

Steinhaus was one of the few Polish professors of Jewish descent. He came from a well-known, quite assimilated Jewish family. A cousin of his had been a great patriot, one of the Pilsudski legionnaires; he was killed during the first World War.

Steinhaus’s sense of analysis, his feelings for problems in real variables, in function theory, in orthogonal series manifested a great knowledge of historical development of mathematics and continuity of ideas. Perhaps without so much interest or feeling for the very abstract parts of mathematics, he also steered some new mathematical ideas in the direction of practical applications.

He had a talent for applying mathematical formulations to matters as common as problems of daily life. Certainly his inclinations were to single out problems of geometry that could be treated from a combinatorial point of view — actually anything that presented the visual, palpable challenge of a mathematical treatment.

He had great feeling for linguistics, almost pedantic at times. He would insist on absolutely correct language when treating mathematics or domains of science susceptible to mathematical analysis.

Auerbach was rather short, stooped, and usually walked with his head down. Outwardly timid, he was often capable of very caustic humor. His knowledge of classical mathematics was probably greater than that of most of the other professors. For example, he knew classical algebra very well.

At his instigation Mazur, a few others, and I decided to start a systematic study of Lie groups and other theories which were not strictly in the domain of what is now called Polish mathematics. Auerbach also knew a lot about geometry. I had many discussions with him on the theory of convex bodies, to which Mazur and I contributed several joint papers.

Auerbach and I played chess at the Café Roma and often went through the following little ritual when I began with a certain opening (at that time I did not know any theory of chess openings and played by intuition only). When I made those moves with the king pawn he would say, “Ah! Ruy Lopez.” I would ask, “What is that?” and he would reply, “A Spanish bishop.”

Auerbach died during the war. I understand that he and Sternbach took poison while being transported by the Germans to an interrogation session, but I do not know the circumstances of’ their arrest or anything else about their lives before and during the Nazi occupation.

I believe my collaboration with Schreier started when I was in my second year of studies. Of the mathematicians at the University and at the Polytechnic Institute, he was the only one who was more strictly my contemporary, since he was only six months or a year older and still a student at the University. We met in a seminar room during a lecture by Steinhaus and talked about a problem on which I was working. Almost immediately we found many common interests and began to see each other regularly. A whole series of papers which we wrote jointly came from this collaboration.

We would meet almost every day, occasionally at the coffee house but more often at my house. His home was in Drohobycz, a little town and petroleum center south of Lwów. What a variety of problems and methods we discussed together! Our work, while still inspired by the methods then current in Lwów, branched into new fields: groups of topological transformations, groups of permutations, pure set theory, general algebra. I believe that some of our papers were among the first to show applications to a wider class of mathematical objects of modern set theoretical methods combined with a more algebraic point of view. We started work on the theory of groupoids, as we called them, or semi-groups, as they are called now. Several of these results can be found in the literature by now, but some others have not yet appeared in print anywhere to my knowledge.

Schreier was murdered by the Germans in Drohobycz in April, 1943.

Another mathematician, Mark Kac, four or five years my junior, was a student of Steinhaus. As a beginning undergraduate he had already shown exceptional talent. My connections with Kac developed a little later during my summer visits to Lwów, when I began to spend academic years at Harvard. He also had the good fortune to come to the United States, a few years after I did, and our friendship started in full measure only in this country.

In 1932 I was invited to give a short communication at the International Mathematical Congress in Zürich. This was the first big international meeting I attended, and I felt very proud to have been invited. In contrast to some of the Polish mathematicians I knew, who were terribly impressed by western science, I had confidence in the equal value of Polish mathematics. Actually this confidence extended to my own work. Von Neumann once told my wife, Françoise, that he had never met anyone with as much self-confidence — adding that perhaps it was somewhat justified.

Traveling west, I first joined Kuratowski, Sierpinski, and Knaster in Vienna. They had all come from Kuratowski’s summer place near Warsaw; on the way to Zürich the professors decided to stop in Innsbrück. We met some mathematicians from other countries also on their way to the Congress and spent a couple of days there. I remember an excursion by cablecar to a mountain called Hafelekar. This was the first time I was ever above two thousand meters, and the view was beautiful. I remember feeling a little dizzy for a few minutes and identifying this feeling with one I had had previously on several occasions when getting the salient points of proofs of theorems I studied in high school.

The Congress in Zürich was an enormous affair compared to any I had previously attended, but quite small in comparison to those after World War II. I still have a photograph of all the members standing in front of the Technische Hochschule. There for the first time I saw and met many foreign mathematicians.

The meeting was interesting, and I found it stimulating to hear about many types or fields of mathematics other than the ones cultivated in Poland. The diversity of mathematical fields opened new vistas and suggested new ideas to me. In those days I went to almost every available general talk.

Many of the German and West European mathematicians appeared to me nervous; some had facial twitches. On the whole compared to the Poles I knew they seemed less at ease. And even though in Poland there was great admiration for the Göttingen school of mathematics, I again felt, perhaps not justifiably, my own sense of self-confidence.

I gave my own little talk feeling only moderately nervous. The reason for this comparative lack of nervousness, I think, in retrospect, was due to my attitude, compounded of a certain drunkenness with mathematics and a constant preoccupation with it.

Somebody pointed out a short old man. It was Hilbert. I met the old Polish mathematician Dickstein, who was in his nineties and walking around looking for his contemporaries. Dickstein’s teacher had been a student of Cauchy in the early nineteenth century, and he still considered Poincaré, who died in 1912, a bright young man. To me this was like going into the prehistory of mathematics and it filled me with a kind of philosophical awe. I met my first American mathematician, Norbert Wiener. Von Neumann was not there, and this was a disappointment. I had heard so much about his visit to Lwów in 1929.

At the hotel swimming pool I met the famous physicist Pauli with Professor Wavre and Ada Halpern. Wavre, Ada’s professor, was a Swiss mathematician, known for his studies of the celebrated classical problem of figures of equilibrium of rotating planetary and stellar bodies, among other things. Ada came from Lwów. She was a very good-looking girl who was studying mathematics at the University of Geneva. For a few years I had an off-and-on romance with her. In front of all this company, I turned to Pauli and tried a pun, saying: “This is a Pauli Verbot” (a Paulian physical principle which asserts that two particles with the same characteristics cannot occupy the same place), referring to Wavre and me who were both there in the company of this pretty young lady.

Another interesting encounter occurred one afternoon in the woods around the famous Dolder Hotel. Having lost my way, I ran into Paul Alexandroff and Emmy Noether walking together and discussing mathematics. Alexandroff knew about some of my work for I had sent him reprints and we had had some previous mathematical correspondence. In fact one of the great joys of my life had been to receive a letter from him addressed to Professor S. Ulam. During this encounter he suddenly said to me: “Ulam, would you like to come to Russia? I could arrange everything and would like very much to have you.” As a Pole, and with my rather capitalistic family background, his invitation flattered me, but such a trip appeared quite unthinkable.

The Congress over, after a little excursion to Montreux with Kuratowski and Knaster I returned to Poland in time to take my Master’s degree.

I had an almost pathological aversion to examinations. For over two years I had neglected to take the examinations which were usually necessary to progress from one year to the next. My professors had been tolerant, knowing that I was writing original papers. Finally, I had to take them — all at once.

I studied for a few months, took a kind of comprehensive examination and wrote my Master’s thesis on a subject which I thought up myself. I worked for a week on the thesis, then wrote it up in one night, from about ten in the evening until four in the morning, on my father’s long sheets of legal paper. I still have the original manuscript. (It is unpublished to this day.) The paper contains general ideas on the operations of products of sets, and some of it outlines what is now called Category Theory. It also contains some individual results treating very abstractly the idea of a general theory of many variables in diverse parts of mathematics. All this was in the fall of 1932 upon my return from Zürich.

In 1933 I took my Doctor’s examination. The thesis was published by Ossolineum, an establishment which printed the Lwów periodical Studia Mathematica. It combined several of my earlier papers, theorems, and generalizations in measure theory.

My degree was the first doctorate awarded at the Polytechnic Institute in Lwów from the new Department of General Studies which had been established in 1927. It was the only department that gave Master’s and Doctor’s degrees, all the others being engineering degrees.

The ceremony was a rather formal affair. It took place in a large Institute hall with family and friends attending. I had to wear a white tie and gloves. My sponsors Stozek and Kuratowski each gave a little speech describing my work and the papers I had written. After a few words about the thesis, they handed me a parchment document.

The ’’aula” — the large hall in which the ceremony took place — was decorated with traditional frescoes. These were very much like some I saw twenty years later on the walls of the MIT cafeteria. The MIT frescoes depict scantily dressed women in postures of flight, symbolizing sciences and arts, and a large female figure of a goddess hovering over a recoiling old man. I used to joke that it represented the Air Force giving a contract to physicists and mathematicians. In Fuld Hall, the Institute Building in Princeton, there is also an old painting in the tea room where people assemble for conversation in the afternoon. There again one sees an old man who seems to be shying away from an angel coming down from the clouds. When I was told that nobody knew what it was supposed to represent, I suggested that it might be a representation of Minna Ries, the lady mathematician who directed the Office of Naval Research at the time, proposing a Navy contract to Einstein, who is recoiling in horror.

After the examinations and ceremonies I published a few more papers and then had to take it easy for the rest of 1933, for a bad paratyphoid infection left me weak for several months — one of the rare times in my life when I was seriously ill.

But not all was serious work and no play. In the early 1930s, a high school teacher of science by the name of Hirniak, a wizened, small man, came to our coffee house. He would sit a few tables away from us, sipping vodka and coffee in turn, and busily scribbling on a pad of paper. Every once in a while he would get up and join our table to gossip or kibitz when Nikliborc and Stozek played chess. Nikliborc would repeat with glee: “Gehirn [brain in German], Gehirniak!”

Hirniak, who taught mathematics, physics, and chemistry, was trying to solve Fermat’s famous problem. This is one of the best-known unsolved problems in mathematics, and for a long time has attracted cranks as well as amateurs, who regularly produce false or very incomplete proofs of Fermat’s conjecture.

Hirniak was a fixture at the coffee house, and his conversation was delightfully picturesque and full of unconsciously humorous statements. We would collect and repeat them to each other; I used to paste some of them on the walls of my room at home.

It turned out that my father knew Hirniak, whose wife owned a large soda-water factory and whose legal affairs were handled by my father’s firm. My father considered Hirniak a humorously foolish person. When he saw my collection of Hirniak maxims, I believe he was surprised and perhaps even wondered about my sanity. I had to explain to him the subtlety of the humor and its special appeal to mathematicians.

Hirniak would tell Banach, for instance, that there were still some gaps in his proof of Fermat’s problem. Then he would add, “The bigger my proof, the smaller the hole. The longer and larger the proof, the smaller the hole.” To a mathematician this constitutes an amusing formulation. He would make weird statements about physics. For example, he would say that half the elements in the periodic table are metals and the other half are not. When someone pointed out that this was riot quite correct, he would reply: “Ah, but by definition we can call a few more of them metals!” He had a wonderful way of taking liberties with definitions.

He studied in Göttingen and described how he would drink cups of wine from an automatic dispenser. Once something went wrong in the machine, and the wine continued to flow. Hirniak continued to drink until he found himself lying on the ground surrounded by a group of people. He heard someone ask, “Vielleicht ist etwas los?” (Maybe something went wrong?). He replied, “Vielleicht nicht.” (Maybe not.) At this, he was carried home in triumph on the shoulders of the crowd.

Here is the story that entertained von Neumann so much when I told him about Hirniak years later in Princeton: one day Hirniak told Banach, Mazur, and me that he had almost proved Fermat’s conjecture and that American reporters would find out about it and would come to Lwów and say: “Where is this genius? Give him one hundred thousand dollars!” And Banach would echo: “Give it to him!” After the war, Johnny said to me one day in Los Alamos, “Remember how we used to laugh at Hirniak’s hundred thousand dollars story? Well, he was right, he was the real prophet while we were laughing like fools.” What Johnny was referring to, of course, was that representatives of the Defense Department, the Air Force, and the Navy were traveling around the Country at the time bountifully dispensing research contracts to scientists. The average contract amounted to about one hundred thousand dollars. ’’Not only was he right,” said Johnny, “but he even foresaw the correct amount!”

Sometime around 1933 or 1934, Banach brought into the Scottish Café a large notebook so that we could write statements of new problems and some of the results of our discussions in more durable form. This book was kept there permanently. A waiter would bring it on demand and we would write down problems and comments, after which the waiter would ceremoniously take it back to its secret cache. This notebook was later to become famous as “The Scottish Book.”

Many of the problems date from before 1935. They were discussed a great deal by those whose names were included. Most of the questions posed were supposed to have received considerable attention before an “official” inclusion could be considered. In several cases, the problems were solved on the spot and the answers included.

The city of Lwów and the Scottish Book were fated to have a very stormy history within a few years of the book’s inception. After the outbreak of World War II, the city was occupied by the Russians. From items toward the end of the book it is evident that some Russian mathematicians must have visited the town. They left several problems and offers of prizes for their solution. The last date appearing in the book is May 31, 1941. Item No. 193 contains a rather cryptic set of numerical results signed by Steinhaus dealing with the distribution of the number of matches in a box! After the start of the war between Germany and Russia, the city was occupied by German troops in the summer of 1941, and the notes ceased. The fate of the book during the remaining years of the war is not known to me. According to Steinhaus, this document was brought to Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) by Banach’s son, now a neurosurgeon in Poland.

During my last visit to Lwów in the summer of 1939, a few days before I left I had a conversation with Mazur on the likelihood of war. People were expecting another crisis like Munich and were not prepared for an imminent world war. Mazur said to me, “A world war may break out. What shall we do with the Scottish Book and our joint unpublished papers? You are leaving for the United States and presumably will be safe. In case of a bombardment of the city, I shall put the manuscripts and the book in a case, which I shall bury in the ground.” We even decided on a location. It was to be near the goal post of a football field just outside the city. I do not know whether any of this really happened, but apparently the manuscript of the Scottish Book survived in good shape, for Steinhaus sent me a copy of it after the war. I translated it in 1957 and distributed it to many mathematical friends in the United States and abroad.

Of the surviving mathematicians from Lwów many are continuing their work today in Wroclaw. The tradition of the Scottish Book continues. Since 1945 new problems have been posed and recorded and a new volume is in progress.

Chapter 3. Travels Abroad

By 1934 I had become a mathematician rather than an electrical engineer. It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me. Perhaps this is a good place to stop for a moment and ponder what being a mathematician means.

The world of mathematics is a creation of the brain and can be visualized without external help. Mathematicians are able to work on their subject without any of the equipment or props needed by other scientists. Physicists (even theoretical physicists), biologists, and chemists need laboratories — but mathematicians can work without chalk or pencil and paper, and they can continue to think while walking, eating, even talking. This may explain why so many mathematicians appear turned inward or preoccupied while performing other activities. This is quite pronounced and quantitatively different from the behavior of scientists in other fields. Of course, it depends on the individual. Some, like Paul Erdös, have this characteristic in the extreme. His preoccupation with mathematical construction or reasoning occupies a very large percentage of his waking hours, to the exclusion of everything else.

As for myself, ever since I started learning mathematics I would say that I have spent — regardless of any other activity — on the average two to three hours a day thinking and two to three hours reading or conversing about mathematics. Sometimes when I was twenty-three I would think about the same problem with incredible intensity for several hours without using paper or pencil. (By the way, this is infinitely more strenuous than making calculations with symbols to look at and manipulate.)

On the whole, I still find conversation with or listening to other people an easier and pleasanter way of learning than reading. To this day I cannot read “how to” instructions in printed form. Psychologically, these are indigestible for me.

Some people prefer to learn languages by the rules of grammar rather than by ear. This can be said to be true of mathematics — some learn it by “grammar” and others “from the air.” I learned my mathematics from the air.

For example, I learned, subconsciously, from Mazur how to control my inborn optimism and how to verify details. I learned to go more slowly over intermediate steps with a skeptical mind and not to let myself be carried away. Temperament, general character, and “hormonal” factors must play a very important role in what is considered to be a purely “mental” activity. “Nervous” characteristics play an enormous role in one’s intellectual development. By the age of about twenty, when development is supposed to be fully completed, some of these acquired traits are perhaps essentially frozen and have become a permanent part of our makeup.

Mathematics is supposed to be in essence only a very general and precise language, but perhaps this is only partially true. There are many ways of expressing oneself. A person who starts early has some particular way of organizing his memory or devises his own particular system for arranging impressions. A “subconscious brewing” (or pondering) sometimes produces better results than forced, systematic thinking, as when planning an overall program in contrast to pursuing a specific line of reasoning. Forcing oneself to persist in a logical exploration becomes a habit, after which it ceases to be forcing since it comes automatically (as a subroutine, as computer people like to say). Also, even if one cannot define what we call originality, it might to some extent consist of a methodical way of exploring avenues — an almost automatic sorting of attempts, a certain percentage of which will be successful.

I always preferred to try to imagine new possibilities rather than merely to follow specific lines of reasoning or make concrete calculations. Some mathematicians have this trait to a greater extent than others. But imagining new possibilities is more trying than pursuing mathematical calculations and cannot be continued for too long a time.

An individual’s output is, of course, conditioned by what he can accomplish most easily and this perhaps restricts its scope. In myself I notice a habit of twisting a problem around, seeking the point where the difficulty may lie. Most mathematicians begin to worry when there are no more difficulties or obstacles for “new troubles.” Needless to say, some do it more imaginatively than others. Paul Erdös concentrates all the time, but usually on lines which are already begun or which are connected to what he was thinking about earlier. He doesn’t wipe his memory clean like a tape recorder to start something new.

Banach used to say, “Hope is the mother of fools,” a Polish proverb. Nevertheless, it is good to be hopeful and believe that with luck one will succeed. If one insists only on complete solutions to problems, this is less rewarding than repeated tries which result in partial answers or at least in some experience. It is analogous to exploring an unknown country where one does not immediately have to reach the end of the trail or all the summits to discover new realms.

It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to “try” more than if you are a pessimist. It is the same in games like chess. A really good chess player tends to believe (sometimes mistakenly) that he holds a better position than his opponent. This, of course, helps to keep the game moving and does not increase the fatigue that self-doubt engenders. Physical and mental stamina are of crucial importance in chess and also in creative scientific work. It is easier to avoid mistakes in the latter, in that one can come back to rethinking; in chess one is not allowed to reconsider moves once they have been made.

The ability to concentrate and the decrease in awareness of one’s surroundings come more naturally to the young. Mathematicians can start very young, in some cases in their teens. In Europe, even more than in America, mathematicians exhibit precocity, education in European high schools having been several years ahead of the more theoretical education in the United States. It is not unusual for mathematicians to achieve their best results at an early age. There are some exceptions; for instance, Weierstrass, who was a high-school teacher, achieved his best results when he was forty. More recently, Norman Levinson proved a very beautiful theorem when he was sixty-one or sixty-two.

At twenty-five, I had established some results in measure theory which soon became well known. These solved certain set theoretical problems attacked earlier by Hausdorff, Banach, Kuratowski, and others. These measure problems again became significant years later in connection with the work of Gödel and more recently with that of Paul Cohen. I was also working in topology, group theory, and probability theory. From the beginning I did not become too specialized. Although I was doing a lot of mathematics, I never really considered myself as only a mathematician. This may be one reason why in later life I became involved in other sciences.

In 1934, the international situation was becoming ominous. Hitler had come to power in Germany. His influence was felt indirectly in Poland. There were increasing displays of inflamed nationalism, extreme rightist outbreaks and anti-Semitic demonstrations.

I did not consciously recognize these portents of things to come, but felt vaguely that if I was going to earn a living by myself and not continue indefinitely to be supported by my father, I must go abroad. For years my uncle Karol Auerbach had been telling me: “Learn foreign languages!” Another uncle, Michael Ulam, an architect, urged me to try a career abroad. For myself, unconscious as I was of the realities of the situation in Europe, I was prompted to arrange a longish trip abroad mainly by an urge to meet other mathematicians, to discuss problems with them and, in my extreme self-confidence, try to impress the world with some new results. My parents were willing to finance the trip.

My plans were to go west (go west, young man!); first I wanted to spend a few weeks in Vienna to see Karl Menger, a famous geometer and topologist, whom I had met in Poland through Kuratowski. This was the fall of 1934, right after the assassination of the Austrian Premier Dollfuss. Vienna was in a state of upheaval, but I was so absorbed and almost perpetually drunk with mathematics that I was not really aware of it.

After a couple of days in a Vienna hotel, I moved to a private boarding house near the University, where a widowed lady rented rooms to students. This was quite a common arrangement in those days. The house was on a little street named after Boltzmann, a great physicist of the nineteenth century, one of the principal creators of the kinetic theory of gases and of thermodynamics.

I visited Menger and at his house met a brilliant young Spanish topologist named Jimenez y Flores, who had already some nice results to his credit. We talked mathematics a good deal. He seemed very well known in night clubs and introduced me to the life of a young man about town.

From Vienna I traveled to Zürich to meet Heinz Hopf, the topologist. He was a professor at the famous Technische Hochschule, with whom I had corresponded. Hopf knew something about my topological results and invited me to visit the institute to give two lectures. One was about work I had done jointly with Borsuk on the “antipodal theorem,” a topological problem. I spoke in German, in a lecture room of the department of agriculture. I recall there were many pictures of prize cows along the walls, which seemed to look at me with sadness and commiseration.

Nevertheless, this visit to Zürich was quite fruitful. I also met a physicist named Grossman, who was a few years my senior and widely traveled. He recommended hotels in France and in England to suit my purse. We discussed philosophy and the role of mathematics in physics.

After two weeks in Zürich, I went to Paris for five weeks, and that was sheer delight. I had been in France before, but this was my first visit to Paris. My uncle Michael’s wife happened to live there at the time and she kindly offered to receive me and to send to my modest hotel her chauffeured limousine to take me sightseeing. I was so embarrassed at the thought of being seen arriving in a Rolls Royce or a Dusenberg at the Louvre or some other museum, it felt so incongruous, that I declined her offer.

I went to the Institut Poincaré with a letter of introduction from one of my professors to the famous old mathematician Elie Cartan. When I entered his office I plunged directly into a mathematical discussion, telling him how I had an idea for a simple and general proof for solving Hilbert’s fifth problem on continuous groups. At first he said he did not quite follow my reasoning, but then he added, “Ah! I see now what you want to do.” Cartan’s little white goatee, vivacious smile, and sparkling eyes gave him an appearance which somehow fitted my mental image of all French mathematicians. He was remarkable for many reasons, not the least because he had done some of his best work in his fifties, when the creativity of most mathematicians is on the decline.

I attended several seminars and talks at the Institut Poincaré and at the Sorbonne. At the first seminar, a young Frenchman named De Possel happened to be talking about one of my results. It made me swell with pride. (De Possel is still teaching in Paris.) I was invited to give a talk in a salle named after the mathematician Hermite, another in the salle Darboux. These halls and streets such as Rue Laplace, Rue Monge, Rue Euler, visible signs that the abstractions worked on by mathematicians were somehow appreciated, became heady wine and added to my general state of euphoria. In my youthful way I wondered, “If only some day a hundred years from now, a little street or even an alley could be named after me.”

In October I decided to go to Cambridge, England. Steinhaus had given me a letter of introduction to Professor G. H. Hardy, a legendary figure in mathematics. In Lwów his discoveries in the theory of numbers were well known, and my friend Schreier used to present his papers in seminars. Stories about Hardy’s eccentricities were widely told.

I found that belonging to the upper middle class did often facilitate things in England. In Dover, when, by mistake, I left the boat through the wrong door, two British plainsclothesmen intercepted me and wanted to know where I was going. I must have looked younger than my twenty-five years for one of them asked me what my father’s occupation was. When I replied that he was a barrister, the man turned to his partner and said in a typically British way: “He is all right, his father is a barrister.” I thought it was very comical that they took my word so easily for this piece of information.

After a few hours in London, I took an evening train for Cambridge. The train stopped every few minutes at stations, all in the dark, whose names were not visible. I asked a young man in my compartment: “How can you tell when it is Cambridge?’’ He thought for a moment and replied: “I am afraid you can’t.” After another silence, I tried to start a new conversation by asking him what he thought about the political situation and whether he thought England would intervene in the Ruhr and help France. He pondered again for a minute or two and answered: “I am afraid not!” I was absolutely delighted by what seemed to me such very, very British utterances. As my knowledge of British mores derived mainly from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie novels, somehow this fitted in.

I got off at Cambridge and went to a hotel called the Garden House which had been recommended by Grossman in Zürich. Since my father was financing my travels, each week I received five or ten pounds at Barclay’s bank from my uncle’s bank in Lwów. In those days this was almost affluence. I walked around Cambridge, admiring the University buildings and looking into bookstores. (I already had a pronounced book-buying — or, at least, book-handling — mania.) The Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle atmosphere I saw in many places enchanted me.

I hunted up a few mathematicians. Besicovitch, a Russian émigré from the Russian Revolution, was one with whom I had corresponded. He had solved one of my problems which had appeared in Fundamenta and had published a paper on it. It was really the first non-obvious example of an “ergodic transformation,” a mapping of a plane onto itself, in which the successive images of a point were dense in the whole plane.

Besicovitch invited me to visit him in his rooms in Trinity College. When I entered his place, he said nonchalantly, “Newton lived here, you know.” This gave me such a shock that I almost fainted. Landmarks in the great history of science like this literally kept me in a state of excitement for the rest of my stay in England.

Besicovitch and I talked mathematics. I wonder if many older persons were accustomed to such young men coming into their rooms and abruptly plunging into scientific problems and theorems without even explaining their own presence or exchanging greetings first. My friend Erdös is still like that at the age of sixty. Von Neumann too, who was so urbane and interested in politics and gossip, would often shift abruptly from a general conversation to technical scientific remarks.

In several ways, my stay in Cambridge was one of the most pleasant periods of my life — intellectually and in a psychological sense. Besicovitch invited me to a dinner at High Table at Trinity College. This dinner was one of the high points of my entire life until then. Present were G. H. Hardy, J. J. Thomson, Arthur S. Eddington, and other famous scientists, and there I was, sitting only a few feet away. The conversation was exciting. I listened to every word. We sat under an old portrait of Henry VIII. Food was served in ancient silver dishes. I noticed that Besicovitch ate with an excellent appetite. After dinner we moved to another room, and he drank brandy after brandy, while the others cast furtive but admiring glances in his direction.

Hardy told anecdotes, one of which I remember. As a youth he was once walking through a thick fog with a man of the cloth and they saw a boy with a string and a stick. Hardy’s clergyman compared this to the invisible presence of God which can be felt but not seen. “You see, you cannot see the kite flying, but you feel the pull on the string.” Hardy knew, however, that in a fog there is no wind and so kites cannot fly. Hardy believed that, in mathematics, the Cambridge examinations called “triposes” were nonsensical. As a demonstration, he persuaded George Polya (who, if anything, was a master of computation and manipulation in classical analysis) to take the mathematics tripos without previous coaching. Polya supposedly failed miserably.

I met Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a brilliant young astrophysicist from India. We had a few meals together at Trinity, where he was a fellow. He collaborated with Eddington for whom he had mixed feelings of admiration and rivalry. A year later, the vacancy in the Society of Fellows at Harvard which I was invited to fill resulted from Chandrasekhar’s acceptance of an assistant professorship in Chicago.

We met again much later when he was a consultant in Los Alamos working on the theory of turbulence and other hydrodynamical problems. Chandra, as he is known among his friends, is one of the world’s most brilliant and prolific mathematical astronomers. His books are classics in his field.

During this stay in Cambridge, Michaelmas term 1934, the university or the authorities of the individual colleges for women — Girton and Newnham — abolished the old rule which forbade men lecturers on the college premises. I was invited to give a seminar on topology. I was, if I am not mistaken, the first male in the history of Girton to cross its threshold to give a lecture.

Of all the scientists I had known in Poland, the only one I saw while in Cambridge was Leopold Infeld, who was a docent in Lwów. I knew him from our coffee houses, and we saw each other a few times in Cambridge.

Infeld was tall, well over six feet, quite portly, with a large head and a large face. He was Jewish, from a simple orthodox background. In his autobiography he devoted much space to a description of his fight to achieve an education and an academic position, neither of which was easily attained.

He was rather gay and witty. I remember what seemed to me a bright remark he made after a month’s stay in England about the difference between Polish and English “intellectual” conversations. He said that in Poland people talked foolishly about important things, and in England intelligently about foolish or trivial things.

Infeld was a very ambitious man and had a colorful career. I do not think his talent for physics or mathematics was quite up to his ambitions. In Poland, I had had some doubts about his real understanding of the mathematics of the deeper parts of general relativity. Perhaps it was because of his rather limited background in fundamental mathematics.

The popular articles he wrote in one of the Warsaw newspapers were well written but, it seemed to me, not always mathematically exact. At the time my sights were set very high and I expected even newspaper articles about science to be comparable to Poincaré’s wonderful writings on popular science or Eddington’s explanations of relativity theory for popular audiences.

Infeld came to Princeton later, a few weeks after I did, and collaborated with Einstein on the well-known Einstein-Infeld book on physics, which became a best seller. He had met Einstein in Berlin, and in his autobiography he describes how impressed he had been by his friendliness and ability to put people at ease. In Princeton I hardly saw him; he was not part of the von Neumann crowd.

The Cambridge architecture, the medieval buildings, the beautiful courtyards, the walks I took through the town, some with L. C. Young (now a professor at the University of Wisconsin), are still among the strongest visual impressions of my life. Like my walks through the Paris of the French Revolution, these have somehow influenced my tastes, associations, readings, and studies to this day.

Early in 1935, I returned from Cambridge to Poland. It was now time to think seriously about a university career, although those were, difficult times in which to find even a modest “docent” position. A series of accidental letters was to change this; in one of them, luckily for me, I received an invitation to visit the United States.