Editing Hugo Steinhaus (section)

==Academic career==

===Interwar Poland===
During the 1916-1917 period and before Poland had regained its full [[Polish Independence Day|independence]], which occurred in 1918, Steinhaus worked in Kraków for the [[Ministry of Interior and Administration of the Republic of Poland|Ministry of the Interior]] in the ephemeral puppet state of [[Kingdom of Poland (1916–1918)|Kingdom of Poland]].<ref name=uniw/>

In 1917 he started to work at the University of Lemberg (later [[Lviv University#Second Polish Republic|Jan Kazimierz University]] in Poland) and acquired his [[habilitation]] qualification in 1920.<ref name=uniw/> In 1921 he became a ''profesor nadzwyczajny'' ([[associate professor]]) and in 1925 ''profesor zwyczajny'' (full professor) at the same university.<ref name=uniw/> During this time he taught a course on the then cutting edge theory of [[Lebesgue integration]], one of the first such courses offered outside of [[France]].<ref name=kac/>

While in Lwów, Steinhaus co-founded the [[Lwów School of Mathematics]]<ref name=wroc/> and was active in the circle of mathematicians associated with the [[Scottish Café|Scottish cafe]], although, according to [[Stanislaw Ulam]], for the circle's gatherings, Steinhaus would have generally preferred a more upscale tea shop down the street.<ref name=mac/>

===World War II===
[[File:KsiegaSzkocka1.JPG|thumb|left|200px|The [[Scottish Book]] from the [[Lwów School of Mathematics]], which Steinhaus contributed to and probably saved during World War II.]]
In September 1939 after [[Invasion of Poland|Nazi Germany]] and the [[Soviet invasion of Poland|Soviet Union]] both invaded and occupied Poland, as a fulfillment of the [[Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact]] they had signed earlier, Lwów initially came under Soviet occupation. Steinhaus considered escaping to [[Hungary]] but ultimately decided to remain in Lwów. The Soviets reorganized the university to give it a more [[Ukrainians|Ukrainian]] character, but they did appoint [[Stefan Banach]] (Steinhaus's student) as the dean of the mathematics department and Steinhaus resumed teaching there. The faculty of the department at the school were also strengthened by several Polish refugees from German-occupied Poland. According to Steinhaus, during the experience of this period, he "acquired an insurmountable physical disgust in regard to all sorts of Soviet administrators, politicians and commissars"{{Cref2|A}}

During the interwar period and the time of the Soviet occupation, Steinhaus contributed ten problems to the famous ''[[Scottish Book]]'', including the [[Banach's matchbox problem|last one]], recorded shortly before Lwów was captured by the Nazis in 1941, during [[Operation Barbarossa]].<ref name=mac/>

Steinhaus, because of his Jewish background, spent the [[Nazi occupation of Poland|Nazi occupation]] in hiding, first among friends in Lwów, then in the small towns of [[Osiczyna]], near [[Zamość]] and [[Berdechów]], near Kraków.<ref name="wroc"/><ref name="kac2"/> The [[Polish anti-Nazi resistance]] provided him with false documents of a forest ranger who had died sometime earlier, by the name of Grzegorz Krochmalny. Under this name he taught clandestine classes (higher education was [[Education in Poland during World War II|forbidden for Poles under the German occupation]]). Worried about the possibility of imminent death if captured by Germans, Steinhaus, without access to any scholarly material, reconstructed from memory and recorded all the mathematics he knew, in addition to writing other voluminous memoirs, of which only a little part has been published.<ref name=kac2/>

Also while in hiding, and cut off from reliable news on the course of the war, Steinhaus devised a statistical means of estimating for himself the German casualties at the front based on sporadic obituaries published in the local press. The method relied on the relative frequency with which the obituaries stated that the soldier who died was someone's son, someone's "second son", someone's "third son" and so on.<ref name=kac2/>

According to his student and biographer, [[Mark Kac]], Steinhaus told him that the happiest day of his life were the twenty four hours between the time that the Germans left occupied Poland and the Soviets had not yet arrived ("They had left, and they had not yet come").<ref name=kac2/>

===After World War II===
[[File:Steinhaus-tablica.JPG|right|thumb|250px|Commemorative plaque, [[Wrocław]], Poland]]
In the last days of World War II Steinhaus, still in hiding, heard a rumor that University of Lwów was to be transferred to the city of [[Breslau]] ([[Wrocław]]), which Poland was to acquire as a result of the [[Potsdam Agreement]] (Lwów became part of Soviet Ukraine). Although initially he had doubts, he turned down offers for faculty positions in [[Łódź]] and [[Lublin]] and made his way to the city where he began teaching at [[University of Wrocław]].<ref name=wroc/> While there, he revived the idea behind the ''Scottish Book'' from Lwów, where prominent and aspiring mathematicians would write down problems of interest along with prizes to be awarded for their solution, by starting the ''[[New Scottish Book]]''. It was also most likely Steinhaus preserved the original ''Scottish Book'' from Lwów throughout the war and subsequently sent it to Stanisław Ulam, who translated it into English.<ref name=mac/>

With Steinhaus' help, Wrocław University became renowned for mathematics, much as the University of Lwów had been.<ref name=kac2/>

Later, in the 1960s, Steinhaus served as a visiting professor at the [[University of Notre Dame]] (1961–62)<ref name=mac/> and the [[University of Sussex]] (1966).<ref name="wprost"/>