Kuratowski

Kazimierz Kuratowski

Born: 2 Feb 1896 in Warsaw, Poland
Died: 18 June 1980 in Warsaw, Poland

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As a student Kuratowski studied engineering in Glasgow, then in Warsaw. Except for a spell in Lvov from 1927 to 1934 he spent all his career at the University of Warsaw.

Kuratowski's main work was in the area of topology and set theory. He was the author of Topologie which was the crowning achievement of the Warsaw School in point set topology. He used the notion of a limit point to give closure axioms to define a topological space.

His 1930 work on non-planar graphs is of fundamental importance in graph theory, he showed that a necessary and sufficient condition for a graph G to be planar is that it does not contain a subgraph homeomorphic to either K5 or K3,3.

His work in set theory considered a function as a set of ordered pairs and this made the function notion as proposed by Frege, Benjamin Peirce and Schröder redundant.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. P S Aleksandrov, In Memory of C Kuratowski, Russian Mathematical Surveys 36 (1981), 215-216.
  3. Obituary, Yearbook of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Session 1980-81 (1982), 40-47.
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JOC/EFR February 1996