Lwów of the west

Abstract

At the end of World War 2, the Yalta/Potsdam Agreements made Lwów part of the Soviet Union’s Ukraine Republic, and the Silesian capital, Wrocław, part of Poland. Most of the faculty of the Lwów’sJan Casimir Universitymoved 320 miles west to the newly Polish city of Wrocław. That included several major figures of the Lwów (and Warsaw) School of Mathematics, settled at the new University and Polytechnic of Wrocław led by the former Rector (President) of the Lwów University, Stanisław Kulczyński, a biologist. Figure1 shows the dramatic shift West of the political boundaries between Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union executed in 1945, and the related move of the academic community from Lwów University to Wrocław.