Władysław Orlicz

Władysław Roman Orlicz ( ; May 24, 1903 – August 9, 1990) was a Polish mathematician linked to the circle of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He was a professor at the University of Poznań and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. From 1977 to 1979, he served as president of the Polish Mathematical Society.

He is known for his research in functional analysis, topology, vector-valued functions, orthogonal series and measure theory. Concepts named after him include Orlicz spaces and the Orlicz–Pettis theorem.

Life and career Orlicz was born on 24 May 1903 in Okocim, then part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria within Austria-Hungary, as the third out of five children of Franciszek Orlicz and Maria . His father died when he was four years old. Orlicz attended schools in Tarnów, Znojmo (now in Czech Republic), and Lwów (now in Ukraine), where his family settled in 1919. As a student, Orlicz excelled especially in the upper grades. He graduated in 1920 from the State Second Real School in Lwów (Polish: Państwowa Druga Szkoła Realna we Lwowie) and voluntarily enlisted in the Polish Army, although he did not take part in any fighting during the Polish-Soviet War (1919–2021).

Orlicz initially enrolled at the Lwów Polytechnic but after a year he changed the university and began studying in the Department of Mathematical and Natural Sciences of the Jan Kazimierz University (now the University of Lviv). His professors included Stefan Banach, Hugo Steinhaus and Antoni Łomnicki. In 1923, still as a student, he started working at the university, first as a demonstrator, and later as a research assistant. In 1925, Orlicz finished his studies at the university but he continued his education attending Kazimierz Kuratowski's lectures at the Lwów Polytechnic. Orlicz influenced the young mathematician Józef Marcinkiewicz through their collaboration on this subject in the mid-1930s. He was known to visit the Scottish Café and engage in mathematical discussions with many prominent mathematicians of the time. He was the author or co-author of 14 problems included in the Scottish Book. In 1937, he became an extraordinary professor at the University of Poznań following a nomination from President Ignacy Mościcki. Orlicz worked at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences until 1974 when he retired. Feliks Barański, Zbigniew Ciesielski, They were first formulated in his 1932 paper entitled Über eine gewisse Klasse von Räumen vom Typus B and published in Bulletin International de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences. Stefan Banach himself had already acknowledged in his monograph published the same year that Orlicz was the first one who introduced those spaces. Orlicz spaces have found wide application in analysis, integral equations, probability, constructive function theory, differential equations, and mathematical statistics. Together with , Orlicz introduced the concept in mathematical analysis known as weighted BV functions.

Other eponymous concepts appearing in the mathematical literature include the Orlicz property, Orlicz category theorem, Mazur-Orlicz theorem, Orlicz interpolation theorem, Musielak-Orlicz space, Orlicz norm, Hardy-Orlicz spaces, Marcinkiewicz-Orlicz spaces and Orlicz-Sobolev spaces. the Golden Cross of Merit (1954), Medal of the 10th Anniversary of People's Poland (1955), the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1958), Honorary Membership of the Polish Mathematical Society (1973), Jurzykowski Prize (1973), 1st degree in 1966).

Orlicz participated at the International Congress of Mathematicians on four occasions: Oslo (1936), Edinburgh (1958), Stockholm (1962) and Warsaw (1983), where he served as honorary president. He authored or co-authored 171 scientific papers and oversaw 39 doctoral dissertations. His influence on the mathematical community in Poznań was immense and he is sometimes described as the founder of the Poznań School of Mathematics. and Adam Mickiewicz University (1983).

The Orlicz Memorial Conference was held in March, 1991 by the University of Mississippi in Oxford, United States. Other conferences in memory of Orlicz were organized in 1998 by the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and in 2000 by the Adam Mickiewicz University and the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Bedlewo.

Personal life Orlicz had four brothers: Kazimierz, Tadeusz, Zbigniew and Michał. Zbigniew died in the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921). Kazimierz, the eldest brother, perished in the Stutthof concentration camp. The remaining brothers became professors: Tadeusz specialized in timber technology while Michał in climatology and metereology.

In 1928, Orlicz married Zofia . She was an assistant in the Faculty of Physics at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. During World War II, she served in the Home Army and was awarded the Order of Virtuti Militari for her involvement in saving Jewish children from the Holocaust. After the war, she was persecuted by the communist authorities and spent five years in prison (1948–1953) for distributing banned press.