Stefan E. Warschawski

Who was Stefan E. Warschawski?

Stefan E. Warschawski was a mathematician, a professor and department chair at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of California, San Diego.

Warschawski was born in Lida, now in Belarus; at the time of his birth Lida was part of the Russian Empire. His father was a Russian medical doctor, and his mother was ethnically German; the family spoke German at home. In 1915, his family moved to Königsberg, in Prussia, the home of his mother's family; Warschawski studied at the University of Königsberg until 1926 and then moved to the University of Göttingen for his doctoral studies under the supervision of Alexander Ostrowski. Ostrowski soon moved to the University of Basel and Warschawski followed him there to complete his studies. After receiving his Ph.D., Warschawski took a position at Göttingen in 1930 but, due to the rise of Hitler and his own Jewish ancestry, he soon moved to Utrecht University in Utrecht, The Netherlands and then Columbia University in New York City. After a sequence of temporary positions, he found a permanent faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis in 1939. During World War II he moved to Brown University and then the University of Minnesota, where he remained until his 1963 move to San Diego, where he was the founding chair of the mathematics department. Warschawski stepped down as chair in 1967, and retired in 1971, but remained active in research: approximately one third of his research publications were written after his retirement. Over the course of his career, he advised 19 Ph.D. students, all but one at either Minnesota or San Diego. Vernor Vinge is among Warschawski's doctoral students.