Józef Marcinkiewicz

Józef Marcinkiewicz (; 30 March 1910 in Cimoszka, near Białystok, Poland – 1940 in Kharkiv, USSR) was a Polish mathematician who worked at the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. He is considered one of the most prominent Polish mathematicians of the Interwar period. Despite his short career, he made substantial contributions to real analysis, Fourier analysis, interpolation theory, orthogonal series, complex analysis, and probability theory.

Concepts named after Marcinkiewicz include the Marcinkiewicz multiplier theorem, Marcinkiewicz interpolation theorem, and Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund inequality. Following the outbreak of World War II, Marcinkiewicz enlisted in the Polish Army and, in 1940, he fell victim to the Soviet-perpetrated Katyn massacre.

Life and career Antoni Zygmund strongly shaped Marcinkiewicz’s early mathematical development. Marcinkiewicz was born on 30 March 1910 in the small settlement of Cimoszka, then part of Congress Poland, 35 km north-west of Białystok, to Klemens and Aleksandra . He was one of five children, with one sister and three brothers. His family was of fairly comfortable means. During his time at the university, Marcinkiewicz conducted research on trigonometric series and Lebesgue integration.

He was also a very active student who participated in the Mathematics and Physics Club, becoming its president in 1932. Upon returning to Wilno, he was appointed a senior assistant and subsequently, in 1937, a docent, becoming the youngest person to hold this position at the university.

At the age of just 29, Marcinkiewicz received an offer of Chair of Mathematics at the Poznań University, with the position of extraordinary professor, which he accepted and was to have started teaching there in the 1939/1940 academic year. In the meantime, encouraged by his fruitful time in Lwów, he decided to submit another application for a scholarship from the National Culture Fund, which proved successful. In 1939, Marcinkiewicz travelled to Paris, where he conducted research with Stefan Bergman, and Raphaël Salem, and to London, where he spent five months at the University College London.

On 2 September, the second day of the war, I came across him accidentally in the street in Wilno, already in military uniform ... We agreed to meet the same day in the evening but apparently circumstances prevented him from coming since he did not show up at the appointed place. A few months later came the news that he was a prisoner of war and was asking for mathematical books. It seems that this was the last news about Marcinkiewicz. During his time in Paris and England, Marcinkiewicz had produced some mathematical work which he had written down in manuscript form. After returning to Poland he gave these manuscripts to his parents for safe keeping. Sadly Marcinkiewicz's parents suffered the same fate as he did and died during the war. No trace of the manuscripts was ever found.

He has a symbolic grave located in Janów, north-eastern Poland. The Marcinkiewicz interpolation theorem is a result in functional analysis bounding the norms of non-linear operators acting on Lp spaces while the Marcinkiewicz–Zygmund inequality gives relations between moments of a collection of independent random variables. The Marcinkiewicz integral proved an especially useful tool in helping better understand and develop the theory of the Hilbert transform. In 1939, he introduced the concept of the Marcinkiewicz space. Together with Stefan Bergman, he studied the complex functions, which culminated in the publication of their joint work Sur les valeurs limites des fonctions de deux variables complexes (1939). He was passionate about learning foreign languages and was fluent in English, French and Italian. Since 1957, the Polish Mathematical Society's branch in Toruń has organized the annual Józef Marcinkiewicz Competition for the best university students' work in mathematics.

In 2011, a street in Białystok was named after Marcinkiewicz in recognition of his achievements and his connection to the region.

In 2021, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance produced a documentary film entitled Wybranice bogów (Gods' Chosen One) devoted to the life and legacy of Marcinkiewicz. It was directed by Konrad Starczewski, Tomasz Matuszczak and Rafał Pękała, and had its premiere at the 13th edition of the NNW Film Festival in Gdynia.

In 2023, a mural in memory of Marcinkiewicz was unveiled at a high school in Sokółka.

In 2024, a memorial room in honour of Marcinkiewicz was officially opened by local authorities at the ZSCKR High School in Janów, which also bears his name as its patron.