Mathematics at the universities of Poznań, Vilnius and Kaunas in the interwar period – a comparative study

The three universities – Poznań and Vilnius in Poland, Kaunas in Lithuania – had much in common: all three were founded in 1919, each promised studies in mathematics, and none possessed a native mathematician of its own. Mathematicians had to be taken from a far. Poznań relied on Zdzisław Krygowski (1872-1955), a newcomer from the Lvov polytechnic, who in the next twenty years laboriously worked up programs of studies and collected academic staff. Teaching was satisfactory (there was a course in cryptography, students of which have later broken the German Enigma) but research rather modest. In Vilnius there happened to be Wiktor Staniewicz (1866-1932), a refugee from the polytechnic in Petersburg. Being rather old and ill, he required support and that came in persons of Juliusz Rudnicki (1881-1948) and Stefan Kempisty (1892-1940), both from the Warsaw polytechnic. The three men secured satisfactory level of studies but only the arrival of Antoni Zygmund (1900-1992) in 1930 and his briliant student Józef Marcinkiewicz (1910-1940) changed the picture by adding a high level research. Kaunas offered a chair to a German mathematician Otto Volk (1881-1989) who worked there 1923-1930, offered good teaching and secured further development. Although following different roots, all three universities succeeded and the article offers some insight into their specific stories.