Władysław Ślebodziński

Who was Władysław Ślebodziński?

Władysław Ślebodziński was a Polish mathematician.

Władysław Ślebodziński was educated at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He was the teacher until 1921. Since 1921 he lectured at the The State High School of Mechanical Engineering Poznań and in the thirties was visiting lecturer at the Poznań University and Warsaw University until 1939. During the Second World War he gave underground lecture for which he was imprisoned, surviving three German concentration camps: Auschwitz prisoner no. 79053, Gross-Rosen and Nordhausen. In KL Auschwitz he gave different, extraordinary, underground university level lecture Underground education in Poland during World War II.

In 1945 he became professor at the coupled Wrocław University and Wrocław University of Technology, and from 1951 he was professor at the Wrocław University of Technology. With Bronisław Knaster, Edward Marczewski and Hugo Steinhaus he was a co-founder of the mathematical journal Colloquium Mathematicum.

From 1949 until 1960 he was a Professor of the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Interest: Differential geometry. In 1931, he introduced a definition of the Lie derivative although the name Lie derivative occurred first in a paper by van Dantzig, as asserted by J.A. Schouten in his introduction to tensor analysis and its geometrical applications.