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Person

Stefan Banach

A man with gray hair and a beard, wearing glasses and a formal suit, is depicted in a portrait.

Polish mathematician (1892–1945), the founder of modern functional analysis. Largely self-taught in his early years, he was discovered by Hugo Steinhaus on a Kraków park bench in 1916. Banach built the Lwów school of mathematics around the legendary Scottish Café, where problems were posed on marble tabletops and prizes ranged from a bottle of wine to a live goose. He died of lung cancer in Soviet-occupied Lwów at fifty-three.

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