Eustachy Żyliński

Eustachy Karol Żyliński (19 September 1889 – 4 July 1954) was a Polish mathematician and university professor known for his work on number theory, algebra, and logic. He was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics.

Biography

Early life and career (1889–1919) Żyliński was born in to a landless noble family. In 1907 he graduated with a gold medal from the gymnasium in Kiev, and in 1911 with a first-degree diploma from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Imperial Saint Vladimir University in Kiev, where he then worked from 1912 to 1914, while doing internships in Göttingen, Cambridge and Marburg. In 1914 he obtained a master's degree (equivalent to today's PhD).

In 1916 he was drafted into the Imperial Russian army. He graduated from a military-engineering school in Kiev and an electrical engineering school in St. Petersburg in 1917 put himself at the disposal of the 1st Polish Corps. From 1918, as an associate professor, he lectured at the Polish University College and the Higher Technical Institute in Kiev. In 1919 he stayed in Warsaw, performing military service as an officer of the Polish Army. In 1925, he proved that "there are exactly two binary functors (namely, binegation and the Sheffer stroke) each of which is sufficient for defining all other unary and binary functors of classical propositional logic." His colleagues included mathematicians such as Stefan Banach and Hugo Steinhaus. 1929 he was dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Jagiellonian University and was the promoter of Władysław Orlicz's doctoral dissertation.

During the Soviet occupation of Lwów he worked as the head of the Algebra Department at the University of Lwów, and during the German occupation (1941–1944) he took part in clandestine teaching at the Jagiellonian University. After the deportation of Poles from Lviv, he initially settled in Łódź. At that time, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was also nominated as consul general in Kiev, but did not assume this office. In 1947 he moved to Gliwice, where in the years 1946–1951 he was the head of the Department of Mathematics at the Faculty of Engineering and Construction of the Silesian University of Technology. In 1951 he retired and returned to Lodz. Żyliński died there in 1954 of a cerebral hemorrhage.