Józef Marcinkiewicz

(b. 12 April N.S., 30 March O.S. 1910, Cimoszka, near Sokółka; d. between 3 April and 12 May 1940, Kharkiv)

Marcinkiewicz attended primary school in Janów and high school in Sokółka. After the closure of the latter school in 1929, he moved to Zygmunt August High School in Białystok, passing the final examination in 1930. He studied mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Stefan Batory University in Wilno (Vilnius), and gained his master’s degree in 1933. He spent the next year at the city’s officer cadet school, taking the rank of platoon cadet. He then returned to the university as a doctoral student under the supervision of Antoni Zygmunt, obtaining his doctorate in 1935. He spent the next year on a scholarship in Lwów (Lviv), and gained his habilitation degree in Wilno in 1937. In the autumn of 1938 he travelled on a scholarship to Paris, and then to England. In June 1939 he was appointed associate professor at Poznań University, where he was due to take over the mathematics department from Zdzisław Krygowski in the coming academic year. Unfortunately this was prevented by the outbreak of war. His research covered functional analysis, probability theory, real function theory, trigonometric, orthogonal and power series, approximation theory, and the theory of functions of a complex variable. He left 56 published works. He is commemorated by the Józef Marcinkiewicz Prize, awarded annually since 1957 by the Toruń branch of the Polish Mathematical Society for the best undergraduate work in mathematics.

Roman Murawski

L. Maligranda, W. Wnuk, 100 lat matematyki na uniwersytecie w Poznaniu 1919–2019, Wyd. Nauk. UAM, Poznań 2021, pp. 291–307 and 454–455.
R. Duda, Matematycy XIX i XX wieku związani z Polską, Wyd. Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław 2012.