Kazimierz Żorawski

His work in these disciplines was to prove important in other fields of mathematics and science, such as differential equations, geometry and physics (especially astrophysics and cosmology).

Kazimierz Żorawski was born in Szczurzyn near Ciechanów, in the Russian Empire, now in Poland, to Juliusz Bronisław Wiktor Żórawski and Kazimiera Żórawska.

In 1893, Żorawski received a doctorate in mathematics from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and in 1895 he traveled to Berlin to study higher level geodesy.

In 1905, Żorawski became a Dean of the Faculty of philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and in 1910, he became an associate member of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

He was a Polish delegate for the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation which was formally established in January 1922 (Marie Curie was a prominent member of this organization).

Upon his release from the camp of Pruszków along with a group of other scientists, Zorawski took refuge in Nieborów, staying at the home of the Radziwill family.

After the Red Army occupied Poland, Żorawski returned to a destroyed Warsaw and lived for a time with his daughter Leokadia Paprocka.

Shortly thereafter, the Ministry for Education gave him a small bedroom with a kitchen at the Students House at the Narutowicz Square in Warsaw, one of the few buildings not destroyed by the Germans during the war.

Kazimierz Żorawski, along with Stanisław Zaremba, (both faculty members of Jagiellonian University) was a cofounder of the Kraków School of Mathematics, to which professors Franciszek Leja, Władysław Ślebodziński and Tadeusz Ważewski also belonged.

Under the political conditions of the time, Stanislaw Zaremba and Kazimierz Żorawski were, for fifteen years, the only representatives of cutting-edge Polish mathematics (...) judging these facts by contrasting them with the current state of affairs, shows their immense progress and accomplishments (...) in spite of the catastrophic effects on Polish mathematics caused by the Nazi occupation.Żorawski was a student of eminent Norwegian professor Sophus Lie, the author of the theory of continuous groups (Lie groups).

Nevertheless, their hopes of marriage continued until 1891, when a dispirited Maria moved to Warsaw and then to Paris, where she eventually married Pierre Curie and earned two Nobel Prizes.

Juliusz became an architect, often compared with Le Corbusier; after World War II he was a professor of architecture at the Kraków Polytechnic.