Early life and education Borsuk was born in 1905 in
Warsaw to father Marian, a surgeon, and mother Zofia (née Maciejewska). In 1923, he graduated from the
Stanisław Staszic State Gymnasium in Warsaw. Between 1923 and 1927, he studied mathematics at the Faculty of Philosophy of the
University of Warsaw. He received his
master's degree and
doctorate from Warsaw University in 1927 and 1930, respectively. His
PhD thesis title was
On the Subject of Topological Characterization of Euclidean Spheres and his advisor was
Stefan Mazurkiewicz. From 1929 to 1934, he worked at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Warsaw. He became a professor in 1938. In the interwar period, Borsuk visited
Lwów, which was a thriving center of mathematics of the
Second Polish Republic, and began his collaboration with
Stanisław Ulam, especially in the field of topology. Borsuk joined the mathematicians in the
Scottish Café and contributed to the open problems which they wrote down in the
famous book. In the years 1939–1944, he gave
secret lectures at the University of Warsaw. In 1943, he was arrested for his participation in the resistance movement and spent a couple of months at the
Pawiak Prison. During the
Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he was transported alongside his family to the
Dulag 121 Camp in
Pruszków. He managed to escape from the camp and remained in hiding until the end of the war.
Later career In 1945, he completed a project in collaboration with
Bronisław Knaster and
Kazimierz Kuratowski concerning the establishment of the
Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1946, he returned to the University of Warsaw where he served as the Head of the Institute of Mathematics from 1952 to 1964. In 1952, he became a member of the
Polish Academy of Sciences, and in 1953, a corresponding member of the
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the
Polish Mathematical Society. He worked as an editor-in-chief of
Dissertationes Mathematicae and deputy editor-in-chief of
Fundamenta Mathematicae. In 1946–47, he lectured at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, in 1959–60 at the
University of California at Berkeley, in 1963–64 at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, and in 1967–68 at
Rutgers University–New Brunswick. In 1976, he was awarded an
honorary doctorate by the
University of Zagreb. Borsuk's students include:
Samuel Eilenberg, Andrzej Kirkor,
Jan Jaworowski, Andrzej Granas, Antoni Kosiński, Karol Sieklucki, Włodzimierz Holsztyński, Rafał Molski, Hanna Patkowska, Andrzej Jankowski,
Włodzimierz Kuperberg, Stanisław Spież,
Krystyna Kuperberg, Jerzy Dydak,
Andrzej Trybulec, Marian Orłowski, Alfred Surzycki. ==Research==