Andrzej Schinzel

Andrzej Bobola Maria Schinzel (5 April 1937 – 21 August 2021 ) was a Polish mathematician who specialised predominantly in number theory.

Education Schinzel earned an MSc in 1958 from Warsaw University and a Ph.D. in 1960 from the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences where he studied under Wacław Sierpiński, with a habilitation in 1962. He was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Career Schinzel was a professor at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IM PAN). His principal interest was the theory of polynomials. His 1958 conjecture on the prime values of polynomials, known as Schinzel's hypothesis H, both extends the Bunyakovsky conjecture and broadly generalizes the twin prime conjecture. He also proved Schinzel's theorem on the existence of circles through any given number of integer points.

Schinzel authored over 200 research articles in various branches of number theory, including elementary, analytic and algebraic number theory. He served as the editor of Acta Arithmetica for over four decades.

Schinzel collaborated with many colleagues, including Paul Erdős and Barbara Rokowska.

Private life Andrzej Schinzel was the elder brother of Polish chess master Władysław Schinzel (born 1943).