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Professor Kazimierz Urbanik |
May 29, 2006, is the first anniversary of the death of Kazimierz Urbanik, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Wrocław University and at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research, teaching and administrative work were decisive in the creation of a major probability theory school in Poland. His over 180 published scientific papers developed novel approaches to problems of probability theory, theory of stochastic processes, mathematical physics, and information theory.
Kazimierz Urbanik was born on February 5, 1930 in Krzemieniec in Eastern Poland (presently in Ukraine). The pride of Krzemieniec was the Lyceum, an educational institution of considerable prestige in Eastern Europe and traditions going back two centuries. Among its graduates was Mark Kac (1914–1984), a well-known Polish-American mathematician. In due time Urbanik entered the Lyceum but his education at its School of Exercises was interrupted by the Second World War.
First the Soviets, then the Germans, and then again, the Soviets occupied the area. At the end of the war, in 1945, as a result of Yalta agreements, the Eastern PolishTerritories were transferred to the Soviet Union while their Polish residents were forced to move to the Western Territories reclaimed from Germany. Urbanik’s family settled in Brzeg, a small town in Lower Silesia, 50 km south-east of Wrocław, the capital of the region. There, in 1948, he passed the final matura high school examination and matriculated at Wrocław University.
Urbanik majored both in mathematics and physics, and showed an early interest in other areas of natural sciences. At one point during his undergraduate studies he was an active participant in nine different seminars. There he met his mentors, Professors Hugo Steinhaus (1887–1972) and Edward Marczewski (Szpilrajn) (1907–1976) who after the war transplanted the traditions of the Lwów and Warsaw Schools of Mathematics to Wrocław.
In 1952 Urbanik graduated from Wrocław University, where he was immediately employed as a junior faculty member. His academic career was swift. In 1956 he received his Ph.D. (under Marczewski) for a dissertation on cascade processes, in 1957 obtained his habilitation and was appointed Associate Professor (Docent). Three years later he was promoted to the rank of Professor. In 1958 Urbanik wrote his fundamental papers on generalized stochastic processes (processes with “sample paths” in Schwartz distribution spaces), solving among others a problem posed by I.M. Gelfand. In 1965, at the age of 35, he was elected to the Polish Academy of Sciences (at that time he was its youngest elected member).
Urbanik, a two-term Rector of Wrocław University and an Ordinary Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, led the Institute of Mathematics at Wrocław University for more than thirty years. As an educator Urbanik was the principal advisor of seventeen doctoral students who continued work influenced by his ideas at academic institutions of five continents. The first- and the third-named authors of this note were among these seventeen Ph.D. students, while the second author was a Ph.D. student of the third one.
Urbanik’s fairness, warmth, generosity and devotion to students were legendary and they reciprocated in kind. He loved doing and teaching mathematics and, despite his long and incapacitating illness about which he never complained, continued working with the students, publishing and fulfilling his editorial duties almost to the last days of his life.
For a couple of terms he was also a Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. There, he played key roles in developing several major projects of importance to Polish mathematics, including the creation of the Stefan Banach Mathematical Center, an international institution located in Warsaw and initially funded by the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Throughout the last half-century of Poland’s political trials and tribulations, despite a high-level involvement in governmental affairs, his integrity was above reproach as he kept the respect and admiration of people from all parts of the political spectrum.
Urbanik was also a popular speaker abroad, with invited visits to Berkeley, Moscow, Paris, Cambridge, New Orleans, Beijing, Delhi, Göttingen, Hanoi, and Cleveland, among others. He spoke several times at the Oberwolfach Institute in Germany. In 1966, during the World Mathematical Congress in Moscow, he delivered a major invited address. In 1980 he founded a journal Probability and Mathematical Statistics (PMS) and was its Editor-in-Chief until 2005 (please see the journal’s web site at www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~pms).
Urbanik’s major and most influential works dealt with generalized and branching processes, probability on groups, extreme point methods in limit theorems, prediction theory, stochastic integration for Lévy processes, operator selfdecomposable and decomposable distributions, quantum mechanics, an axiomatic approach to the concept of information, and concepts of independence in universal algebras, just to mention a few.
A complete list of his publications, awards, honors, and major administrative positions, and a brief description of his extensive research contributions in probability, stochastic processes, abstract algebra, statistical physics, information theory and analysis can be found in our article Kazimierz Urbanik (1930-2005) published in Probability and Mathematical Statistics vol. 25.1 (2005), 1-22.
The forthcoming volume 26 of Probability and Mathematical Statistics will be dedicated to the memory of Kazimierz Urbanik. It will include invited contributions from his scientific friends, colleagues, students and collaborators from all over the world.
Zbigniew J. Jurek
Wrocław University, Wrocław, Poland
Jan Rosiński
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, U.S.A.
Wojbor A. Wojczyński
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.
The deadline for the next issue is 15 October 2006. Please email submissions
as plain text to the Editors:
Krzysztof Dębicki and Zbigniew Palmowski.
If you hear of news about Bernoulli Society members and colleagues which ought to be shared widely then please pass on the information to the Editors.
