Andrzej Schinzel

Andrzej Schinzel (1937 to 2021) was a Polish mathematician who specialised predominantly in number theory. Born in Sandomierz, he studied at Warsaw University, took his doctorate at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences under Waclaw Sierpinski, and spent a year as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in Cambridge and Uppsala. He spent his career as a professor at that institute and served as chair of its scientific council. His principal interest was the theory of polynomials, and his 1958 conjecture on the prime values of polynomials, known as Schinzel's hypothesis H, extends the Bunyakovsky conjecture and broadly generalizes the twin prime conjecture. He wrote over two hundred research articles across elementary, analytic and algebraic number theory, edited Acta Arithmetica for more than four decades, collaborated with Paul Erdos, and was honoured with the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.