Stefan Mazurkiewicz

Stefan Mazurkiewicz was a Polish mathematician, born in Warsaw on 25 September 1888 and died on 19 June 1945, who represented the Warsaw School of Mathematics and worked in mathematical analysis, topology and probability. He earned his doctorate at the University of Lviv in 1913 under Wacław Sierpiński with a dissertation on square-filling curves, and from 1915 he was a professor at the University of Warsaw. After the death of Zygmunt Janiszewski he and Sierpiński took over the editing of Fundamenta Mathematicae. The Hahn-Mazurkiewicz theorem on space-filling curves bears his name, and his 1935 paper on indecomposable continua is regarded as a most elegant piece of point-set topology. In 1919 he broke the most common Russian cipher for the Polish General Staff, which contributed to the Polish victory at the Battle of Warsaw. He supervised eleven doctoral students.