History: Scottish Cafe in Lwów/Lviv

The Scottish Café was a café in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) where, in the 1930s and 1940s, Polish (part of them of Jewish ethnical background) mathematicians of the world famous 'Lwów mathematical school', collaboratively discussed research problems. Among them there were: Stefan Banach, the founder of modern functional analysis; Hugo Steinhaus, one of early founders of game theory and probability theory; Stanislaw Ulam, future member of Manhattan Project, and many others. Ulam recounts that the tables of the café had marble tops, so they could write in pencil, directly on the table, during their discussions. To keep the results from being lost, and after becoming annoyed with their writing directly on the table tops, Stefan Banach's wife provided the mathematicians with a large notebook, which was used for writing the problems and answers and eventually became known as the Scottish Book. The book — a collection of solved, unsolved, and even probably unsolvable problems — could be borrowed by any of the guests of the café. Solving any of the problems was rewarded with prizes, with the most difficult and challenging problems having expensive prizes (during the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II), such as a bottle of fine brandy. For problem 153, which was later recognized as being closely related to Stefan Banach's "basis problem", Stanisław Mazur offered the prize of a live goose. This problem was solved only in 1972 by Swedish mathematician Per Enflo, who was presented with the live goose in a ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland. The Lwów School group has been dispersed during WWII. Majority of members didn't survive the war - murdered by Soviets in Katyn massacre (1940) and in Gulag, and by Germans in Lwów University Professors massacre (1941), in Lwów Getto, Warsaw, and other places. Some (incl. Banach) have been saved by Rudolf Weigl, biologist and inventor of the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus, who hired them as lice feeders in vaccine experiments of his institute. Steinhaus with his wife, both Polish Jews, survived, being hidden 1941-45 by a few Polish families, and later organized mathematical department in Wrocław. Other survivers helped to revive after war mathematical departments in Warsaw and Poznań.