Stefan Banach was an unmarried child of an illiterate servant and a recruit of the Austro-Hungarian army, a child of a laundry room worker. He became a professor, despite completing only two years of college. He didn’t register social norm, his favorite hobby was soccer with town folk, and he spent more money than he made. He didn’t cheat his drinks, and he preferred the bar at the train station to the lecture hall. Some called him an alcoholic.
Hugo Steinhaus, the only son of a wealthy credit union director was educated in Germany. Under communist rule, he completed his background profile with “aristocracy plus bourgeois”. He didn’t drink, he didn’t like when others drank. He never parted with his tie and took care of his tab meticulously. A language purist, in his opinion the word “problem” didn’t exist, only “problem structures” neatly rolled into “prob-structs”. Any doctoral candidate who used their last name first was a failure.
Stanisław Ulam was supposed to become an attorney, like his father, or an architect like his grandfather. Instead, he preferred to stare at the stars and read sci-fi novels by Jules Verne. He was a functioning dreamer, who was part of the team who built the first A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War 2. Afterwards he worked on the even more terrifying H-bomb, with which he wanted to give the world peace.
Stanisław Mazur, a descendant of a prominent pastry chef was a communist, who believed, that communism is the best political system in the world, but personally didn’t want to take advantage of the benefits which communism had to offer. He was famous for his great sense of humor, lightning-fast reflexes, and a natural resistance to publishing the hottest research. He usually became bored quickly and had trouble even with the simplest calculations at the convenience store.
In a world of common people, they would have never met, and even if, without incident and in passing. In the world of mathematics, they created a legend, even though they met by accident. Steinhaus heard a man discuss higher order calculus at a park in Kraków. This person was Banach.
For the longest time they met to talk mathematics at the marble table of the Scottish café in Lviv in Poland of the world of the 1920’s and 1930’s. These meetings and their effects were from then on described as the Lviv School of Mathematics. The only evidence of this school is a graph notebook, with many problems unsolved until now, while their work formed several new branches of mathematics. Their tales became an integral part of the history of science, where geniuses live amongst anecdotes.
Janusz Jeremiasz Filipiak 