Hugo Steinhaus

On this day in 1887, the polish mathematician Hugo Steinhaus was born. Steinhaus received his PhD at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. In World War I Steinhaus fought in the Polish Legion but in World War II, as a jew, he had to rely on friends to hide and protect him. The Polish anti-Nazi resistance provided him with fake documents so that he could secretly teach classes (higher education was forbidden for Poles under the German occupation). Worried about the possibility of imminent death if captured by Germans, Steinhaus, without access to any scholarly material, reconstructed from memory and recorded all the mathematics he knew. After World War II Steinhaus played an important part in the establishment of the mathematics department at Wrocław University and in the revival of Polish mathematics from the destruction of the war. A prolific author, he wrote about 170 scientific articles and books on a vast number of subfields in mathematics. Notably he is regarded as one of the early founders of the game theory, and on the theory of fair division, i.e. how to divide a resource (say a cake) in a manner which is “fair” according to precisely defined criteria, such as proportionality and envy-free.

Date in History: 14 January 1887