Monuments & mounds

Banach and Nikodym Bench in Kraków

By the Planty gardens, a few hundred metres from Wawel Castle (Podzamcze street), stands a bench with the figures of two eminent mathematicians — Stefan Banach and Otton Nikodym. It commemorates a chance meeting of 1916 from which one of the greatest chapters of the Polish school of mathematics is counted.

An overheard conversation

In 1916 Hugo Steinhaus, already a well-known mathematician, was strolling through the Planty gardens when he overheard a conversation about the Lebesgue integral — then a brand-new notion of higher mathematics. He approached the speakers: the self-taught Stefan Banach and Otton Nikodym, a mathematics teacher from a Kraków gymnasium. He told them about a problem he was working on, and a few days later Banach brought him a ready solution. That meeting shaped their further paths: Banach eventually moved to Lwów, where he became a leading figure of the Lwów school of mathematics and the founder of functional analysis.

A bench for the centenary

The sculptures were made by the Kraków sculptor Stefan Dousa, and the bench was unveiled in 2016, on the centenary of that discussion. Nikodym went down in history chiefly as the author of the Radon–Nikodým theorem and a co-founder of the Polish Mathematical Society; Banach died in 1945 in Lwów. You can sit on the bench — it lies right on the walking route from Wawel to the Market Square.