All About L’viv

MAULDIN, R. DANIEL, Scottish Book: Math at the Scottish Cafe
Birkhauser, 1981. 8vo - over 7¾” - 9¾” tall, Hardcover, Cloth, with dustjacket, Good/Good. Previous owner’s bookplate and name stamp on front endpapers, title page, and pg. 49; binding tight; dustjavket, cover, edges, and interior intact and exceptionally clean; near pristine condition.

US$ 85.00 Offered by: Black Oak Books, Berkeley - Book number: 589767

Visit the site: http://www.antiqbook.com/boox/blac/589767.shtml

Apart from the more official meetings of the local sections of the Mathematical Society (which took place Saturday evenings, almost every week!), there were frequent informal discussions mostly held in one of the coffee houses located near the University building - one of them a coffee house named “Roma” and the other “The Scottish Coffee House”. This explains the name of the collection. A large notebook was purchased by Banach and deposited with the headwaiter of the Scottish Coffee House, who, upon demand, would bring it out of some secure hiding place, leave it at the table, and after the guests departed, return it to its secret location. (more…)

The Lviv School of Mathematics was a group of mathematicians who worked between the World Wars in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). They often met at the famous Scottish Café to discuss mathematical problems, and published in the journal Studia Mathematica, founded in 1929. (more…)

Can you hear the shape of a drum?
Mark Kac (pronounced kahts, Polish: Marek Kac, b. 3 August 1914, Krzemieniec, then in the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine; d. 26 October 1984, California, USA) was a Polish and American mathematician of Jewish ancestry [1]. His main interest was probability theory. His question “can you hear the shape of a drum?” set off research into spectral theory, with the idea of understanding the extent to which the spectrum allows one to read back the geometry. (In the end, the answer was “no”, in general.) His book of popularisation with Stanislaw Ulam is a minor classic. (more…)

In mathematics, especially functional analysis, a Banach algebra, named after Stefan Banach , is an associative algebra A over the real or complex numbers which at the same time is also a Banach space. (more…)