1892-1945

Banach was born in 1892 in Krakow, Austria-Hungary, which is now Poland. When he had completed his schooling in Krakow, he decided to abandon his study of mathematics for other subjects, but they did not hold much appeal, so he soon returned to lecture in mathematics at the Institute of Technology in Lvov and later became a professor at the University of Lvov. Banach is known as the founder of modern functional analysis, but his other specialties also brought him a measure of fame: the theory of topological vector space, and what is today known as Banach space as well as Banach algebras. Banach died in 1945 of lung cancer.