Mathwar/Personlist/Banach Stefan
Stefan Banach
Stefan Banach (* March 30th 1892 in Krakow, † August 31st in Lvov)
Life
Banach's father had never given his son much support, but now once he left school he quite openly told Banach that he was now on his own. Banach left Kraków and went to Lwów where he enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering at Lwów Technical University (Politechnika Lwowska). It is almost certain that Banach, without any financial support, had to support himself by tutoring.
At the time Banach studied there, Lwów was, a under Austrian control as it had been from the partition of Poland in 1772. In Banach's youth the polish Poland, in some sense, existed only under Austrian occupation in Kraków and in Lwów, but did not exist and Russia-controlled much of the country. Warsaw only had a Russian language university and was situated in what was named "Vistula Land". With the outbreak of World War I, the Russian troops occupied the city of Lwów. Banach was not physically fit for army service, having poor vision in his left eye.
1941 in Operation Barbarossa, all universities were closed and Banach, along with many colleagues and his son, was forced to eke out a living feeding lice with his blood at Professor Rudolf Weigl's Typhus Research Institute.
Banach planned to go to Kraków after the war to take up the chair of mathematics at the Jagiellonian University but he died in Lvov in 1945 of lung cancer.