Witold Hurewicz

Witold Hurewicz (1904 to 1956) was a Polish mathematician who worked in general topology, algebraic topology and dimension theory. Born in Lodz, he studied in Vienna under Hans Hahn and Karl Menger and received his PhD in 1926, then worked as an assistant to L. E. J. Brouwer in Amsterdam from 1928 to 1936. He moved to the United States, held posts at the University of North Carolina and the Institute for Advanced Study, worked on servomechanisms during the war and from 1945 until his death was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best remembered for the higher homotopy groups, the long exact homotopy sequence for fibrations and the Hurewicz theorem linking homotopy and homology groups. His 1941 book Dimension Theory, written with Henry Wallman, is a classic.