Portal:Poland/Selected biography

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Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) was a Polish military and political leader who was largely responsible for Poland's reëmergence as an independent nation in 1918 and later exercised dictatorial powers during much of the existence of the Second Polish Republic. He was a leader of the Polish Socialist Party early in his political career and later created the Polish Legions which fought alongside the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires against Russia during World War I. In 1917, with Russia faring badly in the war, he withdrew his support from the Central Powers. Piłsudski was named renascent Poland's chief of state in 1918 and marshal of Poland in 1920. In 1919–1921, he led Polish forces to victory in the Polish–Soviet War. He withdrew from political life in 1923, but came back three years later in the coup d'état of May 1926, becoming a virtual dictator of Poland with a firm grip on military and foreign affairs until his death. Though a number of his political acts remain controversial, Piłsudski is held in high esteem by his compatriots. (Full article...)

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Władysław Sikorski (1881–1943) was a Polish military and political leader. Before World War I, he became a founder and member of several underground organizations that promoted the aim of Polish independence. He fought with distinction during the Polish–Soviet War, in which he played a prominent role in the decisive Battle of Warsaw. During World War II he became prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces, and a staunch advocate of the Polish cause on the diplomatic scene. He supported the reëstablishment of diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union, which had been severed after the Soviet alliance with Germany in the 1939 invasion of Poland. In April 1943, however, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin broke off Polish–Soviet diplomatic relations following Sikorski's request that the International Red Cross investigate the Katyn massacre. In July 1943, Sikorski was killed in a plane crash into the sea immediately on takeoff from Gibraltar. The exact circumstances of his death remain in dispute, which has given rise to ongoing conspiracy theories. (Full article...)

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Vladislaus II (Władysław II Jagiełło, Jogaila; ca.1348–1434) was a grand duke of Lithuania and king of Poland. He ruled in Lithuania from 1377, initially with his uncle, Kęstutis. In 1386, he converted to Christianity, was baptized as Vladislaus, married the eleven-year-old Queen Hedwig (Jadwiga) and was crowned Polish king as Vladislaus II. His reign in Poland lasted a further forty-eight years and laid the foundation for the centuries long Polish-Lithuanian union. He gave his name to the Jagiellon branch of the Gediminid dynasty which ruled both states until 1572, and became one of the most influential dynasties in medieval Europe. Jogaila was the last pagan ruler of medieval Lithuania. The allied victory over the Teutonic Knights in the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, followed by the First Peace of Thorn, secured the Polish and Lithuanian borders and marked the emergence of the Polish-Lithuanian alliance as a major European force. His reign is often considered the beginning of Poland's Golden Age. (Full article...)

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Witold Pilecki (1901–1948) was a Polish soldier, founder of the Secret Polish Army resistance group and member of the Home Army during World War II. He was the only person to volunteer to be imprisoned at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. While there, he organized inmate resistance, and as early as 1940, informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany's Auschwitz atrocities. He escaped from the camp in 1943 and took part in the Warsaw Uprising. Pilecki was executed in 1948 by communist authorities. Until 1989, information on his exploits and fate was suppressed by the Polish the communist regime. (Full article...)

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Marian Rejewski (1905–1980) was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who, in 1932, solved the Enigma machine, the main cipher machine then in use by Germany. While studying mathematics at Poznań University, Rejewski attended a secret cryptology course conducted by the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau, which he joined full-time in 1932. Rejewski and his two colleagues then developed an assortment of techniques for the regular decryption of Enigma messages, including the cryptologic "card catalog", the "cyclometer", and the cryptologic "bomb". Five weeks before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, they presented their results on Enigma decryption to their French and British counterparts. Their success jump-started British reading of Enigma in World War II, and the intelligence so gained contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany. (Full article...)

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Stanisław Koniecpolski (c.1590–1646) was a Polish magnate, senator and hetman – the second highest military commander of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Koniecpolski lived a life that involved almost constant warfare and won numerous battles during his military career. Before he reached the age of 20, he had fought in the Dimitriads and the Moldavian Magnate Wars, where he was taken captive by the Ottoman forces in the Battle of Ţuţora in 1620. Released in 1623, he soon defeated Ottoman vassals, the Tatars, in 1624. Outnumbered, he fought Swedish forces of Gustavus Adolphus to a stalemate in Prussia during a Polish–Swedish war. He defeated a major Turkish invasion at Kamieniec Podolski in the Ukraine in 1634, and during his life, led many other successful campaigns against rebellious Cossacks and invading Tatars. He is remembered as one of the most skilled military commanders in the history of Poland and Lithuania. (Full article...)

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Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and possibly the most significant Polish composer since Frédéric Chopin. Lutosławski studied piano and composition in Warsaw, and during World War II he made a living in that city by playing the piano in bars. In the late 1940s and early 1950s his music was banned as formalist by the Stalinist authorities. In the last three decades of the century he became the pre-eminent musician of his country and was presented with a number of international honours, awards and prizes. Lutosławski's early compositions were overtly influenced by Polish folk music. From the late 1950s onwards he developed his own distinctively dense harmonies and innovative aleatory techniques. His works include four symphonies and a Concerto for Orchestra. He composed concertos and song cycles for renowned musicians including Mstislav Rostropovich, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Lutosławski was also a notable conductor of his own music. (Full article...)

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Bolesław Prus, born Aleksander Głowacki (1847–1912), was a Polish journalist and novelist, best known for his novels The Doll and Pharaoh. He was the leading representative of realism in 19th-century Polish literature and remains a distinctive voice in world literature. An indelible mark was left on Prus by his experiences as a 15-year-old soldier in the Polish 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, in which he suffered severe injuries and imprisonment. In 1872, in Warsaw, Prus settled into a distinguished 40-year journalistic career. As a sideline, to augment his income and to appeal to readers through their aesthetic sensibilities, he began writing short stories. Achieving success with these, he went on to employ a broader canvas; between 1886 and 1895, he completed four major novels on "great questions of our age." The Doll describes the romantic infatuation of a man of action who is frustrated by the backwardness of his society. Pharaoh, Prus's only historical novel, is a study of political power and statecraft, set in ancient Egypt at the fall of its 20th Dynasty. (Full article...)

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Mieczysław Jagielski (1924–1997) was a Polish politician and economist. During the times of the People's Republic of Poland he was the last leading politician from the former eastern regions of pre-World War II Poland. Jagielski became a communist member of parliament in 1957 and he would continue to serve in that capacity for seven consecutive terms until 1985. In 1959, he was posted to be a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party and appointed minister of agriculture. After he left the latter position in 1970, Jagielski became a deputy prime minister, and the next year, a member of the party's politburo. In August 1980, Jagielski represented the government during talks with striking workers in Gdańsk. He negotiated the agreement which recognized the Solidarity trade union as the first independent trade union within the Eastern Bloc. In late July 1981, Jagielski was fired from the deputy premiership, reportedly because he failed to produce a recovery program for the economic crisis Poland was experiencing at that time. The same year, he renounced his membership in the politburo and in the Central Committee. (Full article...)

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Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) was a Polish science fiction, philosophical and satirical writer, best known for his novel Solaris. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humankind's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. His works have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon claimed that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. (Full article...)

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John Paul II (1920–2005) served as pope of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City from 1978 until his death almost 27 years later. Born Karol Wojtyła in the Polish town of Wadowice, he served as archbishop of Kraków before becoming one of the longest-serving popes and one of the most-travelled world leaders in history. Continuing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and professing the philosophy of Christian humanism, John Paul II taught about the importance of family and respect for human life and dignity. He criticised materialist ideologies and is widely seen as having been instrumental in ending communism in his native Poland and eventually in all of Eastern Europe. The pope also mended the Catholic Church's relations with other denominations and religions. As part of his emphasis on the universal call to holiness, he beatified or canonized a record number of people, and was himself canonized in 2014. (Full article...)

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Decapitated is a Polish death metal band. It was founded in 1996 by guitarist Wacław Kiełtyka (Vogg), drummer Witold Kiełtyka (Vitek, pictured) and vocalist Wojciech Wąsowicz (Sauron). The members' average age was 14 when they formed the band. One year later, they were joined by 13-year-old bassist Marcin Rygiel (Martin). In 2000, they released their debut album, Winds of Creation. Decapitated soon became one of Europe's finest technical death metal bands. In 2002 and 2004 the band released the albums Nihility and The Negation, respectively. In 2005, Sauron was replaced by Adrian Kowanek (Covan), and the band's fourth album, Organic Hallucinosis, was released in 2006. In 2007, their tour bus was involved in a road accident that killed Vitek and left Covan in a coma. In 2009, Vogg announced Austrian drummer Kerim Lechner (Krimh) as a new member. (Full article...)

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Lech Wałęsa (born 1943) is a Polish trade-union and human-rights activist and politician. Soon after beginning to work as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, he became involved in trade union movement. For this he was persecuted by the Polish communist government, fired, and arrested several times. In August 1980, he was instrumental in negotiating the Gdańsk Agreement between striking workers and the government, and co-founded Solidarity, the first trade union in the Soviet Bloc that was independent from the state. He was interned after martial law was imposed and Solidarity was outlawed in 1981, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. Upon release he participated in the 1989 Round Table talks that led to a semi-free parliamentary election and to a Solidarity-led government. He went on to become the first popularly elected president of Poland in 1990. As head of state, he presided over Poland's transformation from a communist to a democratic and market-oriented state, but his domestic popularity waned. His role in Polish politics diminished after he lost the 1995 presidential election. (Full article...)

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"Jack the Ripper" is the best known pseudonym given to an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished districts in and around the Whitechapel district of London's East End in 1888. Attacks ascribed to the Ripper typically involved women prostitutes from the slums whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. As the murders were never solved, the legends surrounding them became a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and pseudohistory. Among more than one hundred Jack the Ripper suspects suggested since 1888, there have been several Poles and Polish Jews. These include Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski (pictured), also known as George Chapman, a serial killer executed in 1903; Aaron Kosminski, an insane Jew from Kłodawa; and John Pizer, another Polish Jew, also known as "Leather Apron". In 1987, Martin Fido, a ripperologist, speculated that the crimes may have been committed by Nathan Kaminsky, a Polish Jew who went by a generic Jewish name, David Cohen. The civil parish of Whitechapel around the time of the murders was experiencing an influx of immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe; its population was transient, impoverished and often used aliases. The Ripper's true identity will almost certainly never be known. (Full article...)

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Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) was a Polish Romantic poet traditionally counted among the "Three Bards" of Polish literature, a major figure of Romanticism in Poland and the father of modern Polish drama. His works often feature elements of Slavic mythology, Polish history, mysticism and Orientalism, and rely on neologisms and irony for style. Among Słowacki's most popular works are the dramas Kordian and Balladyna, and the poem Beniowski. Słowacki spent his youth in what are now Ukraine and Lithuania, but emigrated to Western Europe after the failed November Uprising of 1830. He then traveled to Switzerland, Italy, Greece and the Middle East to finally settle back in Paris for the last decade of his life, but briefly returned to Poland during the Greater Poland Uprising of 1848. (Full article...)

Portal:Poland/Selected biography/16 Paweł Jasienica, born Leon Lech Beynar (1909–1970), was a Polish historian, journalist and soldier. During World War II, Beynar fought in the Polish Army, and later in the Home Army resistance. Near the end of the war, he was also working with the anti-Soviet resistance, which later led to him taking up a new name to hide from the communist government of the People's Republic of Poland. He was associated with the Tygodnik Powszechny Catholic weekly and several other newspapers and magazines. He is best known for his books about pre-partition Poland, which played an important role in popularizing Polish history among several generations of readers. Jasienica became an outspoken critic of the communist censorship, and as a notable dissident, he was persecuted by the government. He was subject to invigilation by security services, and his second wife was in fact a communist secret police agent. Jasienica's books were banned during a brief period prior to his death. (Full article...)

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Józef Światło, born Izaak Fleischfarb (1915–1994), was a high-ranking Stalinist secret police agent and then defector to the United States. A Zionist, and then Communist activist in his early life, he was taken prisoner by the Germans during the 1939 Invasion of Poland and soon escaped only to be captured and deported by the Soviets. He returned to Poland as a political officer of the Polish First Army and, in 1945, started to work for the Ministry of Public Security, where he was nicknamed "Butcher" for his interrogation techniques. His arrestees included Władysław Gomułka, Marian Spychalski, Michał Rola-Żymierski, and Stefan Wyszyński. After Stalin's death, Światło was sent to East Berlin for consultations with the Stasi where he defected to the U.S. military mission in West Berlin. Included in the U.S. witness protection program, he began working for the CIA and the Radio Free Europe. Światło's written and broadcast incriminations shook the Polish United Workers' Party and contributed to the reform of the Polish security apparatus as one of the factors leading to the Polish October revolution. (Full article...)

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Vladislaus IV (Władysław IV Waza; 1595−1648) was a Polish–Swedish prince of the House of Vasa. He reigned as king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania from 1632, and also claimed the titles of king of Sweden and grand duke of Muscovy (Russia). He was the son of King Sigismund III of Poland and Sweden, and his wife, Queen Anna of Habsburg. The teen-aged Vladislaus was elected tsar by the Seven Boyars in 1610, but did not assume the Russian throne because of his father's opposition and a popular uprising in Russia. Following his father's death in 1632, he was elected king of Poland, with no serious contenders. Vladislaus was fairly successful in defending the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth against invasion, notably through his personal participation in the Smolensk War. He supported religious toleration, carried out military reforms, and was a renowned patron of the arts. The king failed, however, to realize his dreams of regaining the Swedish crown, conquering the Ottoman Empire, strengthening royal power, and reforming Polish internal politics. He died without a legitimate male heir and was succeeded by his half-brother, John Casimir. Vladislaus's death marked the end of relative stability in Poland. (Full article...)

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Hugo Steinhaus (1887–1972) was a professor of mathematics at the University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he helped establish what became known as the Lwów School of Mathematics. He is credited with "discovering" Stefan Banach, a prodigy autodidact. Together they contributed to functional analysis by developing the uniform boundedness principle, also known as the Banach-Steinhaus theorem. After World War II, Steinhaus played an important role in establishing a mathematics department at the Wrocław University. Author of around 170 scientific articles and books, Steinhaus left a legacy in several branches of mathematics, including functional analysis, mathematical logic, geometry, and trigonometry. He is also considered a pioneer in game theory and probability theory. (Full article...)

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Małgorzata Babiarz (born 1984), also known by her stage name Megitza, is a Polish singer, double bass player, and composer. She combines Polish and Eastern European folk music, Romani music and gypsy jazz with world music, worldbeat, Latin American music, pop, and Americana. Born in Zakopane at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, she was introduced to the traditional music of Polish Highlanders (górale) by her father, and began performing in a children folk dance ensemble. She moved to Chicago in 2003 and started her professional career in 2008, when she formed the Megitza Quartet and released her debut album, Boleritza. The Sound Culture Center for Global Arts described Megitza as "a true concert revelation – an unusual voice, charisma and beauty", describing her music as "dynamic, vibrant, full of energy, uniting listeners of all ages." She performs mostly in the United States and in her native Poland. (Full article...)

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Elizabeth of Bosnia (Elżbieta Bośniaczka; ca. 1339–1387) was a queen consort of Hungary and Poland. A daughter of the ban of Bosnia, Stephen II of the House of Kotromanić, she married King Louis the Great of Hungary in 1353. As queen consort, she was overshadowed by her domineering mother-in-law, Elizabeth of Poland, daughter of King Vladislaus the Elbow-high of Poland. She gave birth to their first child, Catherine, 17 years after the marriage, shortly after Louis acquired the crown of Poland, where she was sent to govern as a regent. When Louis died in 1382, their elder surviving daughter, Mary, ascended the throne of Hungary, with Elizabeth as a regent. Unable to retain control over Poland, Elizabeth secured the Polish throne for her youngest daughter, Hedwig. During her regency in Hungary, the queen mother was faced with several rebellions led by Croatian noblemen who wished to take advantage of Mary's insecure reign, before being murdered in the turmoil. (Full article...)

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Stanislaus Augustus (Stanisław August Poniatowski; 1732–1798) was the last monarch of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Recognized as a great patron of the arts and sciences of the Polish Enlightenment and a supporter of progressive reforms, he is also remembered as the king who failed to prevent the destruction of the Commonwealth. He was elected king of Poland in 1764, with the help of his former lover, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Against expectations, he attempted to amend and strengthen the ailing state. His efforts met with external opposition from Russia and Austria, as well as internal from conservative magnates, who sought to preserve their traditional liberties and prerogatives. The defining crisis of his early reign was the War of the Bar Confederation, which led to the First Partition of Poland in 1772. The latter part of his reign saw reforms wrought by the Great Sejm and the Constitution of 1791. These were overthrown by the Targowica Confederation and Russian intervention, leading to the Second and Third Partitions of Poland. Poniatowski abdicated in 1795 and spent the final years of his life under house arrest in Saint Petersburg. (Full article...)

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Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist. Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, she studied at the clandestine Floating University and began her practical scientific training in the same city. In 1891, she followed her older sister to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work, becoming the first female professor at the University of Paris (La Sorbonne). Her achievements included a theory of radioactivity (a term that she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium (which she named for her native country) and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today. During World War I, she established the first military field radiological centres. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (in Physics, shared with her husband, Pierre Curie, and with her doctoral advisor, Henri Becquerel, in 1903), the only woman to win it in two fields (the other being Chemistry, in 1911), and the only person to win in multiple sciences. Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia brought on by years of her exposure to radiation. (Full article...)

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Stanisław Żółkiewski (1547–1620) was a Polish magnate and military commander who fought against Sweden, Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire and the Tatars on the southern and eastern borders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He occupied a number of high-ranking posts, including voivode of Kijów (now Kiev, Ukraine), grand chancellor of the Crown, and grand hetman of the Crown. His best-known victory was against combined Russian and Swedish forces in the battle of Klushino in 1610, following which the Poles seized and occupied Moscow. He died in the battle of Ţuţora against the Ottomans, after refusing to retreat, his heroic death further boosting his fame. He is seen as one of the most accomplished commanders in the military history of early modern Poland. (Full article...)

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Stefan Czarniecki (1599–1665) was a Polish military commander who rose from a petty nobleman to a magnate holding one of the highest offices in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, something that was unprecedented in Polish-Lithuanian history. In 1664 he attained the office of the voivode of Kijów (now Kiev, Ukraine) and in 1665, a few weeks before his death, he became field hetman of the Crown. Czarniecki's major successes came during the Khmelnytsky Uprising in Ukraine, the Russo-Polish War of 1654–67, and the Second Northern War. His use of guerrilla warfare against the Swedes is considered one of the main reasons for the eventual Polish victory in the latter conflict. Czarniecki is regarded as a national hero, his status in Polish history best illustrated by a mention in the national anthem. (Full article...)

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Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826) was a Catholic priest, philosopher, geologist, writer, poet, and statesman. A leading figure of the Polish Enlightenment, he espoused monism, physiocracy and laissez-faire economics, and later Pan-Slavism. He is best remembered for his political writings in support of political reforms in Poland and of the Constitution of 1791. He continued his political career as a member of the State Council of the Duchy of Warsaw and as minister of trade and industry in the "Congress" Kingdom of Poland. Staszic is also noted as the father of Polish geology, statistics and sociology, and a promoter of exploration, mining and industry. In 1800, he co-founded the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning, one of Poland's earliest scientific societies. (Full article...)

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Thaddeus Kosciuszko (Tadeusz Kościuszko; 1746–1817) was a military engineer who became a national hero of Poland and the United States. Having completed his studies in Warsaw and Paris, he worked as a private tutor, but had to flee Poland after a failed elopement with one of his students. Upon learning of the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, Kosciuszko travelled to America in 1776 and joined the rebel cause as a colonel in the Continental Army. Serving under General Horatio Gates, he worked on the defences at Ticonderoga and Saratoga. In 1778, he helped design and supervised the construction of the garrisons at West Point. Back in Poland, Kosciuszko commanded a division of the Polish army in the Polish–Russian War of 1792, which resulted in the Second Partition of Poland. Two years later, he led an unsuccessful uprising against Russia until he was wounded and captured by Russian forces in the Battle of Maciejowice. The defeat resulted in the Third Partition, which ended the existence of Poland as an independent state. Kosciuszko was a firm believer in human rights, standing up for the freedom of all people, from Polish serfs to black slaves in America. He bequeathed the pay received for his service in the American Revolution to his friend, Thomas Jefferson, asking him to spend the money on freeing and educating slaves, including Jefferson's own; the will was never executed. (Full article...)

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Casimir Pulaski (Kazimierz Pułaski; 1745–1779) was a Polish military commander who has been called "the father of American cavalry". He was one of the leading military commanders of the Bar Confederation, fighting against Russian domination of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. When this uprising failed, he was driven into exile and following Benjamin Franklin's endorsement he migrated to North America to aid the cause of the American Revolution. He distinguished himself throughout the revolutionary war, most notably when he saved George Washington's life, and when he created the Pulaski Cavalry Legion and reformed the American cavalry. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Savannah, while leading a daring charge against British forces. Pulaski has been remembered as a hero fighting for freedom both in Poland and in America and is one of few people to be awarded honorary citizenship of the United States. Pulaski Day is observed on October 11 as a U.S. federal holiday and on the first Monday of March as a state holiday in Illinois. (Full article...)

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Emilia Plater (1806–1831) was a Polish–Lithuanian noblewoman and revolutionary. Born in Vilnius, then in the Russian Empire, and brought up in Polish patriotic tradition, she fought in the November Uprising, during which she raised a small unit, participated in several engagements, and received the rank of a captain in the Polish-Lithuanian insurgent forces. Near the end of the uprising, she fell ill and died. Although she did not participate in any major engagements, her story became widely publicized. She is considered a national heroine in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus, venerated by a number of Polish artists as a representative of women fighting for the Polish cause. (Full article...)

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Stanisław Ulam (1909–1984) was a Polish-American mathematician. Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family, Ulam earned his D.Sc. in mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute in 1933. He then worked on the ergodic theory at Harvard University, shuttling between Poland and America, and ultimately settled in the United States after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, becoming an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1943, Ulam joined the Manhattan Project, where he made hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of explosive lenses for an implosion-type nuclear weapon. After the war, he became an associate professor at the University of Southern California, but returned to Los Alamos in 1946 to help Edward Teller develop the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. Ulam contributed to such fields of mathematics as set theory, topology, transformation theory, group theory, projective algebra, number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. With Enrico Fermi and John Pasta, he studied the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem, which became the inspiration for the vast field of nonlinear science. Ulam is perhaps best known for realising that electronic computers made it practical to apply statistical methods to functions without known solutions, and as computers have developed, the Monte Carlo method he invented has become a standard approach to many physical and mathematical problems. (Full article...)

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Jan Karol Chodkiewicz (c. 1560–1621) was one of the most prominent military commanders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of his era. He became a field hetman of Lithuania in 1601 and advanced to the post of grand hetman in 1605. He played a major role in the Wallachian campaign of 1599–1600, the Polish–Swedish War of 1600–11, the Polish-Muscovite War of 1605–18, and the Polish–Ottoman War of 1620–21. His most famous victory was the Battle of Kircholm (now Salaspils, Latvia) in 1605, in which he dealt a major defeat to a Swedish army three times the size of his own. He died on the front lines during the siege of the Khotyn Fortress, a few days before the Ottomans lifted the siege and agreed to negotiate. (Full article...)

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Ignacy Potocki (1750–1809) was a writer and politician who held several high-ranking court and government posts, including that of the marshal of the Permanent Council (cabinet) from 1778 to 1782 and grand marshal of Lithuania from 1791 to 1794. He also worked as an educational activist in the Commission of National Education and the Society for Elementary Textbooks. A major figure in Polish politics of his time, Potocki led the reformist Patriotic Party at the Great Sejm of 1788–1792. He advocated a pro-Prussian orientation and helped conclude an alliance with Prussia in 1790. In the same year, King Stanislaus Augustus and Potocki, until then in anti-royal opposition, began drifting closer together, working on a draft document that would eventually become the Constitution of 3 May 1791. (Full article...)

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Jan Dekert (1738–1790) was one of the most prominent merchants in Warsaw and a political activist advocating more rights for the burghers in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while opposing Jewish competitors. As the representative of Warsaw, he was elected member of the Sejms of 1784 and 1786, and the Great Sejm of 1788–1892. He was a mayor of Warsaw from 1789 to 1790, in which capacity he organized the Black Procession, a demonstration of burghers who delivered a petition to the king on 2 December 1789. This was a major step towards the adoption of the Free Royal Cities Act enfranchising burghers, one of the reforms of the Great Sejm, which was eventually incorporated into the Constitution of May 3, 1791. (Full article...)

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Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist and translator. A principal figure of Polish Romanticism, he is counted one of Poland's "Three Bards" and widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. Born in the Russian territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, he was sentenced to a five-year exile to central Russia for his political activism. He left Russia in 1829 and, like many of his compatriots, lived out the rest of his life abroad. He settled first in Rome, then in Paris, where for a little over three years he lectured on Slavic literature at Collège de France. Mickiewicz died, probably of cholera, in Istanbul, where he had gone to help organize Polish and Jewish forces to fight Russia in the Crimean War. He is known chiefly for the poetic drama Dziady ("Forefathers' Eve") and the national epic poem Pan Tadeusz. His other influential works include Konrad Wallenrod and Grażyna. (Full article...)

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Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) was a Polish journalist, novelist and philanthropist, best remembered for his historical novels. Born into an impoverished Polish noble family in Russian-ruled Congress Poland, he began publishing journalistic and literary pieces in the late 1860s. In the late 1870s he explored the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. He began serializing novels in the 1880s and soon became one of the most popular Polish writers of the turn of the century. Numerous translations gained him international renown, culminating in his receipt of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer." In Poland he is best known for his Trilogy of historical novels — With Fire and Sword, The Deluge and Sir Michael — set in the 17th-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while he is mostly remembered abroad for Quo Vadis, a novel set in Nero's Rome. Several of his works have been filmed, some more than once, with the 1951 Hollywood adaptation of Quo Vadis receiving most international recognition. (Full article...)

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Józef Zajączek (1752–1826) was a Polish military general and politician. He started his career in the Polish-Lithuanian army as an aide-de-camp to Hetman Franciszek Ksawery Branicki. He was also Branicki's supporter on the political scene, before joining the liberal opposition during the Great Sejm in 1790 and becoming a radical supporter of the Constitution of 3 May 1791. As a military commander, he participated in the Polish–Russian War of 1792 and the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794. After the Partitions of Poland, he joined the Napoleonic Army where he served as a general until his wounding and capture during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. In 1815, he became the first viceroy of the Russian-controlled "Congress" Kingdom of Poland. (Full article...)

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Stephen Báthory (Stefan Batory; 1533–1586) was a Hungarian-born king of Poland. He ruled as a voivode of his native Transylvania from 1571 until becoming, in 1576, the second king of Poland elected by the nobility. In the first years of his reign he focused on establishing power: defeating a fellow claimant to the throne, Maximilian II Habsburg, and quelling the Danzig rebellion. His signal achievement was his victorious campaign in Livonia in the mid part of his reign, when he won from Russia a highly favorable treaty at Yam-Zapolsky. He is considered one of the most successful kings of Poland, particularly in the military realm. (Full article...)

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Jan Henryk Dąbrowski (1755–1818) was a Polish military officer and a national hero. He served in the Royal Saxon Army before joining the Polish–Lithuanian army in 1792, not long before the Second Partition of Poland. He was promoted to the rank of general in the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794. After the Third Partition of Poland he became actively involved in promoting the cause of Polish independence abroad. He founded the Polish Legions in Italy serving under Napoleon since 1797, and as a general in Italian and French service he contributed to the brief restoration of the Polish state in the form of the Duchy of Warsaw after the Greater Poland Uprising of 1806. He participated in subsequent Napoleonic Wars, including the Polish–Austrian War and the French invasion of Russia. After Napoleon's defeat, he accepted a senatorial position in the Russian-controlled "Congress" Kingdom of Poland, and helped organize the new kingdom's army. In 1797, Józef Wybicki wrote Poland Is Not Yet Lost, a mazurka to be sung by Polish legionnaires in Italy, with the chorus "March, march, Dąbrowski, from Italy to Poland!" The song later became Poland's national anthem. (Full article...)

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Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), was a Romantic-era composer born in what was then the Duchy of Warsaw of a Polish mother and a French father. A child prodigy, he grew up in Warsaw, where he completed his musical education and composed many of his works before leaving Poland less than a month before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising. At the age of 21 he settled in Paris, where he gained renown as a leading piano virtuoso of his generation despite giving only some 30 public performances during the remaining 18 years of his sickly life. Chopin was a good friend of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and maintained an often troubled relationship with the French writer George Sand. All of Chopin's compositions include the piano; most are for solo piano, although he also wrote two piano concertos, a few chamber pieces, and some songs to Polish lyrics. His keyboard style, which is highly individual, is often technically demanding; his own performances were noted for their nuance and sensitivity. Chopin invented the concept of instrumental ballade; his major piano works also include sonatas, mazurkas, waltzes, nocturnes, polonaises, études, impromptus, scherzos, and preludes. His innovations in style, musical form, and harmony, as well as association of his music, often blending Polish folk tunes and classical tradition, with nationalism, were influential throughout and after the late Romantic period. (Full article...)

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Jan Zamoyski (1542–1605) was a Polish magnate who served as both grand chancellor and grand hetman of the Crown. As such, he commanded both civilian and military power in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and is considered one of the most prominent statesmen in Polish history. He was also one of the richest people in his country; lands either owned or leased by him covered more than 17,000 km² (6,600 sq mi) with 23 towns and 816 villages. In 1589 he established the Zamoyski Family Fee Tail, which existed until 1944. His principal seat and most prized creation was Zamość, a fortified town he founded. Designed as a Renaissance ideal city, it was home to Zamojski Academy, Poland's third oldest university. Despite his wealth and power, in politics Zamoyski led the faction of lesser and middle nobility in support of the "enforcement of laws" movement, which earned him the moniker "Polish Gracchus". He also supported the idea of royal elections open to all Polish nobles and advised the first elective kings, Henry and Stephen, but fell out with Sigismund III. In war – against Muscovy, the Ottomans and Sweden – he employed tactics based on sieges, flanking maneuvers, fortification, artillery, and the principle of conserving his forces. (Full article...)

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Jan Matejko (1838–1893) was a Polish painter and academic. He is best known for large canvases devoted to major figures and events in Polish history, such as Stańczyk, Skarga's Sermon, Rejtan, Union of Lublin, Battle of Grunwald, Prussian Homage and Constitution of 3 May. His other works include imaginary portraits of Polish monarchs and mural paintings in Kraków's St. Mary's Basilica. With his style described as "colourful, detailed and imaginative", he reminded Poles of their nation's former glory at a time when it lacked political independence. His vision of national history has been propagated in Polish textbooks to this day. In 1872, Matejko became a rector of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, which now bears his name. Among his students were such artists as Maurycy Gottlieb, Jacek Malczewski, Józef Mehoffer and Stanisław Wyspiański. (Full article...)

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Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was a Polish statesman. As the co-founder and chief ideologue of the right-wing National Democracy movement, he was one of interwar Poland's most influential politicians, known as the father of Polish nationalism. A prominent spokesman for Polish national aspirations during World War I and Poland's delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was instrumental in the restoration of his homeland's independence, but, except a brief stint as foreign minister in 1923, he never wielded official political power. Before independence, Dmowski saw aggressive Germanization of ethnicaly Polish territories in the German Empire as the major threat to Polish culture and advocated a degree of accommodation with another partitioning power – the Russian Empire. He favored re-establishment of Polish independence by nonviolent means and supported policies favorable to the middle class. Convinced that only a Polish-speaking Roman Catholic could make a good Pole, he marginalized renascent Poland's ethnic minorities and he was vocally anti-Semitic. Dmowski was the chief political opponent of Józef Piłsudski, who sided with the Central Powers against Russia, and of his vision of Poland as a multinational federation. (Full article...)

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Maximilian Kolbe (Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, 1894–1941) was a Conventual Franciscan friar best known for volunteering to die in place of a fellow inmate at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Born Raymund Kolbe of a Polish mother and an ethnic German father, he joined the Franciscans with his brother in 1907 and professed his final vows in 1914. He studied philosophy and theology in Rome, where he was ordained priest, before returning to Poland in 1919. He was active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate (Niepokalana) Virgin Mary. In 1927, he founded near Warsaw a monastery, known as Niepokalanów, along with a seminary, a radio station, and a publishing house, where he was the editor-in-chief of the monthly Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate). During the 1930s, he undertook missions to China, Japan and India. Kolbe was accused of expressing anti-Semitic sentiments in his publications, but also known to have sheltered Jews during the Holocaust. He was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1941 and imprisoned at Auschwitz. At the end of July, he volunteered to be starved to death instead of one of ten inmates selected for punishment. He was killed by a lethal injection after spending two weeks in a starvation cell. Kolbe was declared a martyr and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982. (Full article...)

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Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958) was a Polish philosopher and sociologist who worked in Poland and the United States. Over the course of his career, he moved his focus from philosophy to sociology and is considered a major figure in the history of the latter field of study in both countries. He established the first Polish department of sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he worked from 1920 to 1939. His career in America begun in 1917 at the University of Chicago and continued at Columbia University and at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Znaniecki won international renown as co-author, with William I. Thomas, of the study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which is considered the foundation of modern empirical sociology. He also made major contributions to sociological theory, introducing such terms as "humanistic coefficient" and "culturalism". (Full article...)

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Premislaus II (Przemysł II; 1257–1296) was the first king of Poland after a hiatus of more than two centuries. Born posthumously as the only son of Duke Premislaus I of Greater Poland, he was brought up by his uncle, Duke Boleslaus the Pious, until he came of age and began to rule the Duchy of Poznań. Through inheritance, by 1294 he had expanded his domain over the duchies of Kalisz, Lesser Poland and Pomerelia, but he was forced to retreat from Lesser Poland, leaving it to King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia. Thanks to the mediation of Archbishop Jakub Świnka of Gniezno, Premislaus formed an anti-Bohemian alliance with the dukes of Kuyavia, Vladislaus the Elbow-high and Casimir II of Łęczyca. With much of Poland's territory under his rule, he decided to take the Polish throne; he was crowned by Świnka in Gniezno, in 1295. His reign was cut short nine months later, as he was murdered during a failed kidnapping attempt orchestrated by the margraves of Brandenburg. (Full article...)