The Scottish Book was a thick notebook used by mathematicians of the Lwow School of Mathematics

Lwów School of Mathematics

The Lwów School of Mathematics was a group of mathematicians who worked between the two World Wars in Lviv, then known as Lwów and located in Poland, but now located in western Ukraine. The mathematicians often met at the famous Scottish Café to discuss mathematical problems, and published in the...

 for jotting down problems meant to be solved. The notebook was named after the "Scottish Café

Scottish Café

The Scottish Café was the café in Lwów where, in the 1930s and 1940s, mathematicians from the Lwów School collaboratively discussed research problems, particularly in functional analysis and topology....

" where it was kept.

Originally, the mathematicians who gathered at the cafe would write down the problems and equations directly on the cafe's marble table tops, but these would be erased at the end of each day, and so the record of the preceding discussions would be lost. The idea for the book was most likely originally suggested by Stefan Banach

Stefan Banach

Stefan Banach was a Polish mathematician who worked in interwar Poland and in Soviet Ukraine. He is generally considered to have been one of the 20th century's most important and influential mathematicians....

, or his wife, who purchased a large notebook and left it with the proprietor of the cafe.

Problems contributed by individual authors

A total of 193 problems were written down in the book.

Stanisław Mazur contributed a total of 43 problems, 24 of them as a single author and 19 together with Stefan Banach. Banach himself wrote 14, plus another 11 with Stanislaw Ulam and Mazur. Ulam wrote 40 problems and additional 15 ones with others.

During the Soviet occupation of Lwów, several Russian mathematicians visited the city and also added problems to the book.

Hugo Steinhaus

Hugo Steinhaus

Władysław Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus was a Polish mathematician and educator. Steinhaus obtained his PhD under David Hilbert at Göttingen University in 1911 and later became a professor at the University of Lwów, where he helped establish what later became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics...

 contributed the last one in May 1941 (other sources give March 1941), which involved a question about the likely distribution

Probability distribution

In probability theory, a probability mass, probability density, or probability distribution is a function that describes the probability of a random variable taking certain values....

 of matches within a matchbox — a problem motivated by Banach's habit of chain smoking cigarettes — shortly before the German attack on the Soviet Union

Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...

.

Continuity

After World War II, an English translation annotated by Ulam was published by Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...

 in 1957.

After World War II, Steinhaus, now at the University of Wrocław revived the tradition of the Scottish book by initiating The New Scottish Book.

External links

• Scottish book preface