Władysław Zygmunt Ślebodziński

Quick Info

Born

6 February 1884
Pysznica, Galicia, Austrian Empire (now Poland)

Died

3 January 1972
Wrocław, Poland

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Summary

Władysław Ślebodziński was a Polish mathematician who first introduced the Lie derivative. He survived imprisonment in Auschwitz.

Biography

Władysław Ślebodziński was the son of Ignacy Ślebodziński (1847-1921) and Anna Gorylska (?-1939). Ignacy was 18 years old and studying at a secondary school in Rzeszów in Galicia when the January Uprising broke out in 1863. Poland had been partitioned in 1772 but a part continued to exist as an independent country until 1795 when, after the Third Partition, there was no longer any independent Poland. The borders of the partitions were redrawn at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when Galicia was made part of the Austrian partition. Over the following years there were many attempts to re-establish an independent Poland, some through political means others through armed uprisings. The January Uprising was one of the largest armed uprisings which began in January 1863 and continued until all the insurgents were captured in 1864. Ignacy Ślebodziński volunteered for the Rzeszów unit that came to the aid of the January Uprising. He went to Kraków to study law but there was arrested in one of a series of roundups of people suspected of activities against the government. He was accused of belonging to an independence conspiracy, and imprisoned in Kraków. After his release he continued to study law in Kraków. He was appointed as an adjunct, a lawyer added to judicial resources, in Rozwadów in 1879; he served in that capacity until 1884. During this time, in 1882, he married Anna Gorylska.

Władysław Ślebodziński was the eldest of his parents five children, having three younger sisters, one of whom died at the age of fifteen, and one younger brother. He was born in Pysznica, Galicia on 6 February 1884 and baptised on 14 April of the same year. His father Ignacy was appointed as a judge in Rozwadów in 1890 and, let us note at this point, he published the book Unfinished historical drama (Polish) about the January Uprising in 1909. Władysław completed his schooling in Kraków at the Imperial and Royal St Anne's Gymnasium. This boys' school had been established by the Jagiellonian University in 1586, had become known as the Collegium Nowodworskiego after it was endowed by Bartłomiej Nowodworski, was renamed St Anne's Lyceum in 1818, and then given the name Imperial and Royal St Anne's Gymnasium in 1850. Władysław sat his matura examination on 2 June 1903 and passed with distinction. Later that year he began his studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

At the Jagiellonian University, Ślebodziński studied mathematics, physics and chemistry. He was taught mathematics by Kazimierz Żorawski and Stanisław Zaremba. Żorawski had been named an extraordinary professor at the Jagiellonian University on 1 May 1895, being promoted to ordinary professor of mathematics in 1898. Zaremba had been appointed as an ordinary professor of mathematics in 1900; his teaching style was described by Stanisław Gołąb [5]:-

[Zaremba's] teaching was characterised by absolute rigour and an insistence on an exposition of a subject's subtleties. His lecturing style employed long and convoluted sentences, whose logical progression became clear only after closer scrutiny. He enjoyed working on and solving difficult problems that bogged down other researchers. Always taking a philosophical view of a problem, Zaremba combined physical intuition with enormous erudition, a method that enabled him to connect seemingly unrelated problems.

Ślebodziński was taught physics by August Wiktor Witkowski (1854-1913), who was chairman of the Department of Physics, and by Władysław Natanson (1864-1937) who was head of the Department of Theoretical Physics. He was also taught chemistry by Karol Olszewski (1846-1915) who worked on X-rays. As an undergraduate Ślebodziński joined Ruch, an organisation of university students associated not only with the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia but also to other parties such as the nationalist Polish Socialist Party. He also joined the campaign for Ignacy Daszyński, elected to the Austrian Parliament, who advocated the independence and reunification of all Polish territories. On 16 June 1908, Ślebodziński passed the university examinations to qualify him to teach mathematics and physics at secondary schools.

On 31 October 1908, Ślebodziński married Anna Gisella Zarnecka (1879-1970) in the church of St Nicholas in Kraków. Władysław and Anna had two children, a son Lesław Ślebodziński (1909-1989), who became a chemistry teacher, and a daughter Zofia Krystyna Ślebodzińska (1912-2002), married name Maciejewska, who became a mathematics teacher. Zofia graduated from secondary school in Poznań in 1930 then studied mathematics at Poznań University graduating in 1935. She taught mathematics, teaching classes in secret during World War II. In September 1945 she moved to Wrocław, where she taught at the 1st State Gymnasium and High School, and from 1950 she gave lectures at the Evening Engineering School. In 1955 this school was incorporated into the Wrocław University of Technology, where she worked until her retirement in 1972. Let us return to Władysław Ślebodziński's biography.

On 21 August 1908 Ślebodziński was appointed as a deputy teacher at the Gymnasium in Sanok, where he began teaching mathematics on 1 September of that year. On 13 October 1909, he was appointed a full-time teacher at the Imperial-Royal Real School in Tarnobrzeg. At this school, as well as mathematics, he taught German and Polish, natural history, geography, and geometric drawing. He was also the manager of the Teachers' Library, the Youth Library and the natural history office. In addition, he looked after the school's botanical garden. In 1910 he was elected secretary of the Board of the Tarnobrzeg Circle of the Society of the People's School. Not only was he highly involved in teaching and other duties in Tarnobrzeg but it was in that city that he began to undertake research in mathematics. Although he eventually became a specialist in differential geometry, at the start of his research career he was interested in Galois theory.

On 24 August 1912, he was transferred from Tarnobrzeg to the Imperial-Royal Real School in Kraków where he taught mathematics and physics. On 19 July 1913, having been awarded a scholarship from the Władysław Kretkowski Foundation, he was given a one-year leave from the Imperial-Royal Real School to conduct scientific work outside Kraków. He went to Germany to study at the University of Göttingen, one of the world-leading centres for mathematics. There he attended lectures by Constantin Carathéodory, Edmund Landau and David Hilbert.

Ślebodziński was in Göttingen when Austria declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Russia began to mobilise in support of Serbia on 30 July and on the following day Germany demanded Russia "cease all war measures against Germany and Austria-Hungary" within 12 hours. When this did not happen, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and, on the same day, Ślebodziński was forced to return to Kraków. He remained in Kraków for a while, then was evacuated to Vienna and was conscripted into the Imperial-Royal army on 15 August 1915. After only six weeks in the army, on 30 September, he was declared by the Austrian authorities as indispensable in education, and sent back to Kraków. He taught at the First Imperial-Royal Real School from 1916. In Kraków at this time he met many leading mathematicians including Hugo Steinhaus, Stefan Banach, Włodzimierz Stożek (1883-1941) and Władysław Nikliborc (1889-1948). Ślebodziński discussed forming a mathematical society with the other mathematicians and the Mathematical Society in Kraków was established on 2 April 1919; one year later it became the Polish Mathematical Society.

In 1919 Ślebodziński was appointed to the Gymnasium in Gniezno, a city about 50 km east of Poznań but in the following year he moved to Poznań where he worked at the Teachers' Seminary. He was appointed as a lecturer in mathematics at the State Higher School of Machine Design and Electrical Engineering in Poznań in 1921 and continued to work there until 1939. From 1923, he also gave lectures at the University of Poznań. In the same year he founded the Poznań branch of the Polish Mathematical Society. After settling in Poznań, Ślebodziński began to publish papers: Several theorems on the rolling of surfaces (Polish) (1923); Contribution à la théorie des courbes et des congruences d'un espace riemannien à trois dimensions Ⓣ (1925); Recherches géométriques sur le champ statique de gravitation Ⓣ (1926); On the metrics of space in the vicinity of a stationary material point (Polish) (1926); and Sur les quadriques de l'espace riemannien Ⓣ (1927).

In September 1927 the First Polish Mathematics Congress was held in Lwów. Ślebodziński was a chairman of the Geometry Section and presented three papers in Polish: Development of differential geometry in the last decade; On supersurfaces of four-dimensional Euclidean space; and Several properties of the gravitational static field. He was now producing mathematics of the highest quality, but he did not have a doctorate. His colleagues pressed him to submit a doctoral thesis and Wacław Sierpiński, who strongly encouraged him, managed to arrange financial support. He registered for a doctorate at the University of Warsaw and he was assigned Kazimierz Żorawski as his thesis advisor. He was awarded his doctorate on 20 June 1928 for his thesis On a Certain Class of Riemann Space. Perhaps his most important result, however, was in 1931 in his paper Sur les équations canoniques de Hamilton Ⓣ in which introduced the Lie derivative. Its importance can be seen by the fact that an English translation of his 1931 paper was published in 2010, see [18]. Witold Roter explains its importance in [14]:-

One of his greatest achievements was the introduction (in the paper 'Sur les équations canoniques de Hamilton' Ⓣ) of a new differential operator which can be applied to scalars, tensors and affine connections. Later (1932) the operator was called the Lie derivative by van Dantzig.

The outstanding Japanese geometer Kentaro Yano devoted to the notion a monograph ['The Theory of Lie Derivatives and its Applications' (1955)], where one can find the definition of the Lie derivative (of general geometric objects), its basic properties and many applications. Apparently Yano's book contains all the results published on the subject up to 1955. He studied there groups of motions, groups of affine motions, groups of projective and conformal motions. Moreover, he considered also the Lie derivatives in general affine spaces of geodesics, in compact orientable Riemannian manifolds, and almost complex manifolds.

Thus, the Lie derivative contributed to the quick development of many areas of differential geometry. It is an important and powerful instrument in the study of groups of automorphisms and has extensive and important application in geometry. It belongs to very useful and important notions in differential geometry.

It seems that David van Dantzig was the first who applied the notion of the Lie derivative to physics. More precisely, he applied the Lie derivative to the thermo-hydrodynamics of ideal fluids ['On the thermo-hydrodynamics of perfectly perfect fluids' (1940)]. The Lie derivatives now play an important role in mathematical physics in connection with conservation laws and the study of symmetries of solutions of field equations such as Einstein's equations of general relativity.

Ślebodziński continued to work on gaining the qualifications he still lacked, in particular the habilitation degree. He registered for this degree at the University of Warsaw and again his advisor was Kazimierz Żorawski. He was awarded his habilitation on 15 May 1934 and following this he was appointed as a docent at the University of Warsaw in addition to his positions in Poznań.

On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland and Poznań quickly fell to the advancing troops. He was forced to leave the city where all his property (including unpublished papers) and the library were destroyed and he settled in the village of Lisice Wielkie near Konin in central Poland. In the winter of 1939-1940, he was displaced again and settled in Bochnia in the south of Poland where he began taking part in secret teaching. The occupying German forces had closed all universities in Poland and even secondary education for Poles was not allowed by the authorities. Many teachers and lecturers took huge risks by continued teaching Polish students in private houses, and sometimes in religious establishments. From Bochnia he moved again, this time to Raba Wyżna about 75 km south west of Bochnia. Again he took part in secret teaching.

One of the places where secret teaching took place was Głowiński Palace in Raba Wyżna. This Palace had been built for Jan Zduń in the years 1900-1902 and Ślebodziński taught there in secret. He was arrested on Friday, 13 November 1942 as a result of denunciation for conducting secret teaching in the Głowiński Palace and imprisoned in Raba Wyżna. From Raba Wyżna he was taken to the Gestapo headquarters located in the Hotel Palace in Zakopane. The Gestapo had turned the basement of the Hotel Palace into prison cells where many Poles were held and most were tortured. From Zakopane, Ślebodziński was taken to the Montelupich Prison in Kraków which had been taken over by the Gestapo in March 1941 and today is widely known as having been "one of the most terrible Nazi prisons in occupied Poland." Prisoners there were interrogated using "medieval torture" methods. The 183 Polish professors from the Jagiellonian University who had been arrested in November 1939 had been taken first to Montelupich Prison before being moved to concentration camps and in fact most of the prisoners there were Polish political prisoners. Some prisoners were executed in Montelupich while others sent to concentration camps, including Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.

Ślebodziński was sent to Auschwitz on 1 December 1942 where his entire body was shaved, his personal details were recorded and he was assigned the number 79053. He was then issued with striped uniform and bathed in the camp bathhouse. Assigned to Block No 6, he was on a starvation diet and made to dig ditches. Later he was sent to Block No 19 for convalescence where he was allowed to write a letter to his wife dated 9 May 1943. The Waffen-SS and Police Hygiene Institute at Auschwitz carried out lab work for the SS and police units. Prisoners did the lab work and those with scientific skills were used. After convalescing, Ślebodziński worked there in conditions, although bad, were better than the horrific conditions in other parts of Auschwitz. He was able to teach mathematics to Józef Hulanicki who was also a prisoner. Both survived Auschwitz and years later Hulanicki was awarded a doctorate and invited Ślebodziński to the party afterwards. Jan Pytel, who was at the party, said [23]:-

They were imprisoned in Auschwitz in the first period of the camp's operation, so they had enough time to get to know each other well. The professor, raising a toast in honour of Józek, said that he owed him a debt of gratitude, because it was he who saved his life. Hulanicki protested that he did not recall such a situation. To which the professor replied: "But Mr Józef, I would never have survived Auschwitz if I had not had someone to teach mathematics there."

By the middle of January 1945 Soviet troops were approaching Auschwitz and SS units began an evacuation of prisoners. At this time there were around 60000 prisoners who were either made to march north west from the camp to Gliwice or due west to Wodzisław on 17 January. Ślebodziński was on what became known as the "Death March" to Wodzisław. Anyone who fell behind on the march or could not continue was shot. He marched through the following villages: Brzeszcze, Jawiszowice, Miedźma, Ćwiklice Pszczyna, Studzionka, Poręba, Pawłowice, Jastrzębie Zdrój, Mszana, Wilchy, reaching Wodzisław Śląski. At the train station in Wodzisław Śląski Ślebodziński was one of the prisoners who were loaded onto open coal cars and sent to a camp inside Germany. He was sent to the Nordhausen-Dora concentration camp near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. Two months later, as US troops approached Nordhausen-Dora in April 1945 many prisoners were again sent on a Death March. Ślebodziński, however, remained in the camp and was freed on 11 April by US troops. He had been saved 880 days after his arrest.

After the liberation of the camp, Ślebodziński organised a school for two Poles and a Czech. One of the students was Stanisław Potoczek (1923-2013) who went on to obtain the degree of doctor of medical sciences in 1961, then habilitated in 1963, became an associate professor in 1971, and a full professor in 1979. The first organised transport back to Poland was on 18 July 1945 and Ślebodziński returned to Poland and was reunited with his family. Back in Poland, he was offered positions in either Poznań or Wrocław and he chose the latter where he taught at both the University and the Polytechnic. Edward Marczewski writes [24]:-

Władysław Ślebodziński came to Wrocław for a few days. He had lectured in Poznań before the war and now wanted to fulfil the intention he had made in Auschwitz and announced to his camp companions that after the war he would be a professor in Wrocław, at a Polish university.

In Wrocław in 1945 he was appointed as an associate professor and head of the Department of Geometry at the Faculty of Mathematics which was a joint department of both the University of Wrocław and of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. He worked with Bronisław Knaster, Edward Marczewski and Hugo Steinhaus to develop the Wrocław school of mathematics [25]:-

They were united by their pioneering zeal and certainty that Wrocław is and will remain Polish, as well as their will to remain there permanently. As mathematicians, they had a serious and world-famous body of work, so they had a great and natural scientific authority, they knew their worth, and they valued each other. All four of them lived in Biskupin, which had survived the siege ..., which was conducive to maintaining close and friendly relations.

Ślebodziński, Knaster, Marczewski and Steinhaus founded the journal Colloquium Mathematicum in 1950. In September 1951, the Faculty of Mathematics was divided between the two Wrocław universities and from that time on each had its own Faculty of Mathematics. Ślebodziński became the head of the Department of Mathematics of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology and was given the title of full professor. He also worked at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He led two seminars in Wrocław, one being on differential geometry and the other on Riemann spaces with recursive curvature. He retired in 1960 at the age of 76 but continued to be a thesis advisor to doctoral students. He advised a total of eleven such students while in Wrocław, eight of whom were awarded the degree after he retired. In fact his last doctoral student Hanna Matuszczyk was awarded her doctorate on 10 November 1971 only about 6 weeks before Ślebodziński's death.
See THIS LINK.

Ślebodziński received many honours for his outstanding contributions made in the most difficult of circumstances. He was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit in 1954, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1958, and the Medal for Outstanding Merits for the Development of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology in 1970. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Wrocław University of Technology in 1965, an honorary doctorate by Poznań University of Technology in 1967, and also an honorary doctorate by Wrocław University in 1970. He was elected President of the Polish Mathematical Society, serving in this role during 1961-1963; following this he was made an honorary member of the Society.

He died in Wrocław on 3 January 1972 and was buried in the Holy Family Cemetery in that city. On his tombstone, in accordance with his wishes, in addition to his name and the dates of his birth and his death, the following inscription was placed: "God is Love, Mathematician, Prisoner of Oświęcim No. 79053."

An auditorium at the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Wrocław and a street in Wrocław were named after him. The journal Colloquium Mathematicum, of which he was a founder, published "A collection of articles commemorating Władysław Ślebodziński" in 1972, see [22].

References (show)

1. Z Butlewski, On the scientific and teaching activity of professor doctor Władysław Ślebodziński (Polish), Fasciculi Mathematici 4 (1969), 11-14.
2. W Dembecka, Władysław Ślebodziński (Polish), in Wielkopolski Słownik Biograficzny (Poznań, 1983), 47-49.
3. R Duda, Mathematicians of the 19th and 20th Centuries Associated with Poland (Polish) (Wrocław, 2012).
4. T Huskowski, Władysław Ślebodziński. On the occasion of the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the Wrocław University of Science and Technology (Polish), Wiadomości Matematyczne 9 (1967), 169-173.
5. R Kaluza, Through a Reporter's Eyes: The Life of Stefan Banach (Birkhauser Boston Inc, 1996).
6. M Klonowski and H Langner-Matuszczyk, Władysław Ślebodziński: 1884 - 1972: matematyk, więzień Auschwitz (15 April 2014).
   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1upjH7dbBq-plnX5UEzltoTAGAfDhK6Pe/view?pli=1
7. H Langner-Matuszczyk, Władysław Ślebodziński - Matematyk, Więzień Klauschwitz NR 79053, in M Halub and A Manko-Matysiak (eds.), Śląska Republika Uczonych (Wrocław, 2016), 399-425.
   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DTuDXINxQw26L0rvdBOiXqORNw9oTbxr/view?pli=1
8. H Langner-Matuszczyk, Władysław Zygmunt Ślebodziński, in B Brandt-Golecka, T Broczek and H Langner-Matuszczyk, Aby Pamięć Przetrwała (Wrocław, 2018), 29-59.
   https://sites.google.com/pwr.edu.pl/slebodzinski/
9. H Langner-Matuszczyk, Personal Memories of Professor Władysław Ślebodziński (Wrocław, 2020).
   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cVvj_XVRnlMXfebM7x2d_I9bF217uJAU/view
10. List of Władysław Ślebodziński's publications (2024).
    https://sites.google.com/pwr.edu.pl/slebodzinski/
11. Z K Maciejewska, Biographical Note of Professor Władysław Ślebodziński's Only Daughter (Wrocław, 2021).
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xs1p2zNVHT1_28NRVIvhOIsWfFOMBuSl/view
12. E Marczewski, Przemówienie do Profesora Władysława Slebodzinskiego na uroczystym posiedzeniu Polskiego Towarzystwa Matematycznego w Poznaniu, 6 kwietnia 1967 roku, Wiadomości Matematyczne 10 (1) (1968), 197-200.
13. Z Pogoda, Początki Geometrii Różniczkowej w Polsce, Roczniki Polskiego Towarzystwa Matematycznego Seria VI: Antiquitates Mathematicae 1 (2007), 115-129.
14. W Roter, Władysław Ślebodziński - a brief biography, Gen Relativ Gravit 42 (2010), 2527-2528.
    https://trautman.fuw.edu.pl/publications/Papers-in-pdf/112.pdf
15. M Sękowska and D Węglowska, Władysław Ślebodziński, in Biographical dictionary of Polish mathematicians (Tarnobrzeg, 2003), 240-241.
16. I Ślebodziński, Unfinished historical drama (Polish) (Drukarnia Towarzystwo Domu Narodowej, 1909).
17. B Szwedo, Władysław Ślebodziński, Tarnobrzeski Słownik Biograficzny 1 (Tarnobrzeg, 2013), 213-218.
    http://tbc.tarnobrzeg.pl/Content/5216/tsbt1.pdf
18. A Trautman, Editorial note to: Władysław Ślebodziński, On Hamilton's canonical equations, Gen Relativ Gravit 42 (2010), 2525-2528.
19. Władysław Ślebodziński, Politechnika Wrocławska (30 January 2024).
    https://wmat.pwr.edu.pl/o-wydziale/aktualnosci/wladyslaw-slebodzinski---matematyk--wiezien-auschwitz--pionier-wroclawskiej-nauki-11351.html
20. Władysław Ślebodziński, MyHeritage (2024).
    https://www.myheritage.com/names/w%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_%C5%9Blebodzi%C5%84ski
21. Władysław Ślebodziński, The Mathteacher (2024).
    https://www.tomaszgrebski.pl/blog/matematycy/slebodzinski-wladyslaw
22. Collection of articles commemorating Władysław Ślebodziński, Colloquium Mathematicum 26 (1972), 1-389.
23. Tak rodziła się Politechnika Wrocławska, Wrocław Polytechnic (12 November 2014).
    https://pwr.edu.pl/uczelnia/aktualnosci/lists_historia_45-6604.html
24. E Marczewski, Początki matematyki wrocławskiej, Wiadomości Matematyczne 12 (1969), 65.
25. R Duda and A Weron, Wrocławska szkoła matematyczna, Wiadomości Matematyczne 42 (2006), 75.

Additional Resources (show)

Other websites about Władysław Ślebodziński:

1. Mathematical Genealogy Project
2. MathSciNet Author profile
3. zbMATH entry

Cross-references (show)

1. History Topics: Polish mathematical congresses of 1927, 1931 and 1937
2. Other: Previous changes: up to November 2024

Written by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
Last Update November 2024