Mathematician for All Seasons: Recollections and Notes, Volume 2 (1945-1968)

Recently I had occasion to review the first volume of Hugo Steinhaus, Mathematician for All Seasons, in tandem with The Scottish Book, seeing that Steinhaus was a very major player in Polish mathematical circles between the World Wars and one of the mainstays of the circle of mathematicians frequenting the famous Scottish Café in Lwów, Poland. The first volume covered the period from Steinhaus’s birth in 1887 to 1945, the end of the Second World War; the second volume deals with Steinhaus’s life from 1945 till the time of his last diary entry in 1968. Steinhaus died four years later.

It is due to Steinhaus’s fortunate practice of meticulously keeping a diary, dealing with many dimensions of his life and the myriad events he was part of, that these two fine volumes possess the poignant and informative quality they do: through the lens of Steinhaus’s experiences covering life in academic circles in Poland, Germany, and to an extent the United States, two world wars, the lot of a Jew under the Nazis, and many travels (and displacements), we are able to share in these events as related by an eyewitness and a participant. Both books are very well-written and edited (indeed, the principal idea has been to let Steinhaus talk for himself: the footnotes provide additional commentary and explanation), and they are hugely evocative given not only the mathematical themes dealt with but certainly also the cultural and personal ones.

The second volume of Hugo Steinhaus, Mathematician for All Seasons starts off with Poland in the wake of World War II, with control now ceded to (or, more accurately, seized by) the USSR. Tellingly, the very first entry of Steinhaus’s diary, launching Chapter 1, “Between Kraków and Wrocław,” reads as follows: “October 16, 1945. I am now resuming the diary interrupted on August 28. I have gradually been getting used to being myself again.” What ensues is Steinhaus’s deeply personal and often quite revealing account of his life among the ruins and his work in rebuilding Polish academic life and culture, in the context of academic mathematics. And yet, even under these dire circumstances there is an element of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: “November 22, 1945. I am made dizzy by a veritable whirlpool of happenings: constant filling out of questionnaires, and meetings about budgets, allocations of resources, etc.” Life in the academy is equipped with certain invariants.

There are a number of poignant and historically interesting photographs included in this part of the book, including depictions of “Students helping to rebuild the Wrocław Polytechnic in 1946,” and a “Scene of one of the first lectures held at Wrocław University in the academic year 1945/1946,” presenting a crowded room of very serious and engaged young Polish scholars evidently cognizant of the privilege they enjoy now that the war is finally over.

In due course Steinhaus visits the New World: “… on the morning of June 16 we saw Manhattan. What a target for an atom bomb! … We docked at 9 am, and I was helped through … customs and immigration … On the way [to Pennsylvania Station] I was able to see some of New York City. It has the look of a southern town, gay and multicolored … I was met at Princeton Station by von Kármán. Princeton University itself reminded me of a monastery.” This trip to the United States was really quite an unusual event in those days immediately following the war, given the descent of the Iron Curtain: when Steinhaus returned to Poland after his American sojourn he was met with “troops surrounding the train [at the Polish border] and six soldiers, some attached to the Department of the Treasury, some border guards, and others seconded from God knows where, all armed with machine guns, confronted me in my compartment — me alone since no one else was returning to Poland. This — that is, my returning — intrigued them the most: He was in America and he didn’t stay there?”

Steinhaus went about his task of rebuilding mathematics in Poland, both in the context of universities and beyond: “In the second semester I taught mathematics to students specializing in that subject and ran a seminar for them. Several … seem very capable …”; and then we read: “I have completed the work on statistical norms for the Polish Committee on Standardization …” As these accounts proceed one discerns a certain positive trajectory attending all this heavy labor: “September 10, 1949 … A Polish Mathematical Institute has come into being, and I am to be the head of the Applied Division … A joint mathematics meeting comprised of the VII-th Polish and the III-rd Czechoslovak Congresses was held recently in Prague … Although I was Deputy Conference Chairman I was not consulted on any matter of importance …” Yes, something like business as normal is beginning to emerge — consider, for example, the following passage from the May 29, 1950 entry: “The hype about ‘learning’ is also beginning to be seen as fake, since those institutions that were quickest in preparing themselves for the academic task have already become bogged down by bureaucrats with their endless questionnaires on the fulfillment of some official plan, so-called.” And everything is exacerbated by the marvels of the communist system: “It had become progressively more difficult for an Assistent to be examined for his Habilitation and obtain an appropriate position, since this all has come to depend crucially not only on his own political stance but also on the Party’s opinion of his professor.” And things get even worse: “The Soviets wish to restrict Poland academically to being a mere third-rate appanage of the great Soviet Academy.” (A propos, this brings to mind something particularly meaningful to me: in graduate school my office mate was the late Erazm Behr from Warsaw via Chicago, soon to be a dear friend, whose opinion of Russia was never positive and often hilarious: there’s a long history there and it abides. Erek passed away not long ago: God rest his soul.)

This section of the book is rather sizable, taking us all the way to p. 283 (of 377). The next chapter is very short: titled “America again,” it describes Steinhaus’s affiliations with the University of Notre Dame from 1961 to 1962. The last chapter of the book, “Home Again,” ends with the diary entry of July 22, 1968, in which Steinhaus comments on geopolitical themes featuring Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubček — I remember it well: I was a 12-year-old kid in the Netherlands, waiting with my family to emigrate to the United States; we landed in New York on 2 October, 1968. The awareness that there was unrest behind the Iron Curtain made for a particular sense of urgency for us to get to the United States and the freedom and security that awaited us there. Revisiting these realities in Steinhaus’s diary carries a certain charge with it.

In summary, then, these two books about and by Steinhaus (as a diarist) are effective on many counts. There is the mathematics, of course, and the academic life (in an increasingly broad sense), and there is the historical dimension of a first-person account of one who lived through so much of the madness of the twentieth century, what with its wars and geopolitics of an entirely unprecedented order. But I think that, more than anything, Hugo Steinhaus, Mathematician for All Seasons is an autobiographical document of exceptional interest: what a fascinating life, and what a marvelous account of it.

Michael Berg is Professor of Mathematics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA.