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The Life of Stefan Banach.

Article  in  The American Mathematical Monthly · June 1997

DOI: 10.2307/2975096

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Sheldon Axler
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The following book review was published in the American Mathematical Monthly
104 (1997), 577–579.

The Life of Stefan Banach. By Roman Kaluża. Translated and edited by

Ann Kostant and Wojbor Woyczyński. Birkhäuser, Boston, 1996, x + 137,
$24.50.

Reviewed by Sheldon Axler

In at least one printing of the current (fifteenth) edition of the Encyclopedia

Britannica, the entry on Stefan Banach did not contain the words “Poland”
or “Polish”. The Britannica called Banach a “Soviet mathematician”. The
encyclopedia fixed its error in later printings, but the mathematics community
has not yet adequately documented Banach’s life and ideas. A computer search
of Mathematical Reviews reveals more than eleven thousand publications with
the word “Banach” in the title; “Hilbert” occurs in only seven thousand titles.
Yet no mathematician or historian of mathematics has produced a book-length
biography of Stefan Banach.
The book under review was written neither by a mathematician nor by a
historian. The author, a Polish reporter and journalist, writes well about math-
ematics without using any mathematical symbols. Professional mathematicians
will spot a few technical errors of the type that inevitably creep into exposition
at this level. For example, we read that “the only linear transformations” on a
finite-dimensional Euclidean space are “translations, rotations, and reflections”.
Such small mistakes in mathematical details can easily be forgiven because the
author does a good job of capturing the flavor of early functional analysis and
its creators.
The book suffers more from the lack of a historian’s perspective than from
an absence of mathematical expertise. Some events described in the book cry
out for more explanation. For example, consider the author’s description of
the Nazi efforts to eliminate the intelligentsia in occupied Poland during World
War II. Before capturing the Polish university town of Lvov, where Banach lived
and worked, German officials compiled a list of prominent professors, scientists,
and writers in Lvov who would be executed. One night shortly after German
soldiers had entered Lvov, SS units murdered forty leading intellectual figures
in Lvov without even the pretense of trials. But Banach was untouched by the
Nazi death squads. An alert reader will wonder why Banach, who at this time
was President of the Polish Mathematical Society and a Dean at the university,
was not among the intellectuals marked down for liquidation. Unfortunately
the author does not comment on the apparent disparity between his descrip-
tion of Nazi plans to crush Polish intellectual life and the survival of Banach,
Poland’s most influential mathematician. Was Banach spared because he had
too much fame? Or were the occupying forces so mathematically illiterate that
they had never heard of Banach? The author does not even speculate about
these questions that beg to be answered.

1
 As another example of a tantalizing tidbit from the book that needs more
explanation, consider the following account (page 51) of Banach’s support for
the mathematical logician Leon Chwistek:
. . . when at some point Chwistek applied for a position in logic in
Lvov, Banach backed him unequivocally and helped him to obtain
the post. The affair scandalized half of intellectual Poland since
Chwistek, in addition to being a respected scholar, also had a well-
deserved reputation as being a somewhat strange and very eccentric
artist.
Banach himself was “somewhat strange” and “eccentric”; that description surely
fits many mathematicians. So why would Banach’s support for such a person
have “scandalized half of intellectual Poland”? Readers will realize that some-
thing more must have been involved here, but the author provides no hints to
help solve this mystery.
In 1928 Stefan Banach and his colleague Hugo Steinhaus founded Studia
Mathematica, which quickly became the most important journal specializing
in the then new field of functional analysis. Today’s mathematics librarians,
grappling with budget problems, will be amused to learn that the first volume
of Studia Mathematica cost $1.50 outside Poland.
When teaching the graduate course in functional analysis, I always use the
Krein-Milman Theorem and its appearance in Studia Mathematica as an excuse
to inject a bit of history into the classroom. The Krein-Milman Theorem states
that in a locally convex topological vector space, every compact convex set is
the closed convex hull of its extreme points. This result was published (in
somewhat less generality than the version just stated) in the 1940 volume of
Studia Mathematica, which also contained two papers written by Banach. That
volume of the journal was printed on poor-quality paper, clearly due to wartime
conditions. The most curious feature of the 1940 volume is that each article
(they are all written in either English, French, or German) appears with an
abstract in Russian. Obviously Lvov, where Studia Mathematica was published,
lay in the Soviet zone of occupation at the time of publication. Two weeks after
Germany had invaded Poland from the west in September 1939, the Soviet Union
marched into Poland from the east. Poland was partitioned between Germany
and the Soviet Union until the summer of 1941, when Germany attacked the
Soviet Union and occupied all of Poland.
The 1940 volume of Studia Mathematica was the last one edited by Banach,
who died at age 53 shortly after World War II ended in 1945. After an absence
of eight years, Studia Mathematica resumed publication in 1948 in Wroclaw.
Poland’s border had moved westward after World War II, so that Lvov was
then in the Soviet Union (no doubt this accounts for the Britannica’s claim that
Banach was a “Soviet mathematician”). A few years ago Lvov again changed
countries—it is now part of Ukraine. Today Studia Mathematica, still a fine
journal specializing in functional analysis, is published in Warsaw. The cover
of each issue still proudly bears the names of the founding editors Banach and
Steinhaus.

2
 In 1932 Banach published his famous book Théorie des Opérations Linéaires,
based on his Polish version published a year earlier. Remarkably, Théorie des
Opérations Linéaires remains in print today more than six decades after its
original publication, partly because of its historic value as the first monograph
on functional analysis but also because of the clean, modern style with which
Banach presents the fundamentals of the subject (as created in good part by him
and his collaborators). While a graduate student, I read Théorie des Opérations
Linéaires to study for my French exam. I remember the thrill of seeing func-
tional analysis developed by a legendary hero of twentieth century mathematics
and my delight in his extraordinarily clear writing. I also remember my amuse-
ment that what we today call “Banach spaces” are called “spaces of type (B )”
in Banach’s book. From the book under review I learned that Banach had
previously written several popular high school mathematics textbooks for use
throughout Poland; perhaps writing for a high school audience had honed Ba-
nach’s excellent expository skills.
The Life of Stefan Banach left me hungry for more information about this
fascinating figure. However, the author has performed a valuable service by
uncovering some previously unknown data about Banach and by interviewing
many of the dwindling number of people who knew Banach. This sketchy biog-
raphy is a good place to start for someone wanting to learn about Banach.

Mathematics Department
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
current address:
Mathematics Department
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA 94320 USA
axler@sfsu.edu

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