By Anna Hackett
An exhibition in Ireland pays tribute to an exiled Polish scholar whose groundbreaking work contributed significantly to the development of computer science, and whose life was shaped by Poland’s dramatic and traumatic 20th-century history.
Jan Łukasiewicz gave “profound testimony to the Polish strength of spirit”, said Jan Dziedziczak, the Polish government’s plenipotentiary for Poles abroad, as Łukasiewicz’s remains were laid to rest in Warsaw’s historic Powązki cemetery last month, 66 years after his death in Ireland.
The ceremony marked the end of a repatriation process that brought the remains of Łukasiewicz – who spent the last ten years of his life exiled in Dublin – back to his beloved homeland.
Reburial ceremony for Jan Łukasiewicz in Warsaw, November 2022 (UdSKiO, under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)
The previous day, a Polish ministerial delegation had been in Dublin to collect Łukasiewicz’s remains and honour the academic at various events, including visiting an exhibition dedicated to his life hosted at the Royal Irish Academy where the Pole had been a professor from 1946 until his death in 1956.
The exhibition, entitled The Life and Career of Professor Jan Łukasiewicz: Polish Genius of Logic, Philosopher, Post-War Refugee in Ireland, runs until 23 December 2022 before embarking on a nationwide tour of Ireland.
“A considerable amount of modern computer science is built upon his academic work,” notes Eoin Kinsella, who co-created the exhibition.
“His legacy in that respect, in terms of the academic knowledge that he left, has practical applications to our everyday lives as our everyday interactions with technology have certainly iterated from what he had done”.
Opening of the Łukasiewicz exhibition at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin (image: Rafael Photograph)
Some of Łukasiewicz’s achievements included three-valued logic, which recognises more than two truth values as proclaimed by classical Aristotelian logic, and inventing the mathematical notation known as the Polish notation, which is used in numerous programming languages.
As well as his academic achievements, Łukasiewicz’s life was also intertwined with the dramatic and often tragic history of Poland in the 20th century: wars, shifting borders, foreign occupation and communist rule.
Like many Poles at the time, Łukasiewicz ultimately decided he had no choice but to flee. However, his choice of destination was not typical. Instead of going to North America or the United Kingdom like many of his contemporaries, he came to Ireland.
A flourishing academic and political career in interwar Poland
Jan Łukasiewicz was born in 1878 in the city that is now Lviv in Ukraine, but was then part of Austro-Hungary and would in 1918 become part of the reborn Polish state (under its Polish name of Lwów).
He studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Lwów and was awarded a doctorate sub auspiciis Imperatoris in 1902, presented only to the most accomplished students in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In 1915, Łukasiewicz became Chair of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. Four years later, he was appointed as a minister with responsibility for education and religious affairs in Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski’s cabinet – the first government of the reborn Polish republic.
Łukasiewicz (second from left) receiving an award from Warsaw mayor Stefan Starzyński (left) in 1935 (Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, under public domain)
Łukasiewicz’s professional life flourished during the interwar period. He served as vice-rector and then rector of the University of Warsaw, founded the Polish Logical Society, and was a prominent member of the renowned Lwów-Warsaw School, established by his mentor Kazimierz Twardowski and widely considered the most important movement in the history of Polish philosophy.
War and exile
However, the outbreak of war in 1939 brought this period of success to a shuddering halt for Łukasiewicz – just as it did for Poland as a whole, which suffered enormously under Nazi German and Soviet occupation.
Large quantities of Łukasiewicz’s unpublished manuscripts and research were destroyed in the German bombing campaign on Warsaw.
In his diary, Łukasiewicz recalled the years 1939 to 1944 as “probably the worst period of our lives”. He noted that during this time “the university was closed, professors’ salaries were not paid … life was not only difficult because of material shortages, but also very upsetting for moral reasons”.
As the end of the war approached and the Red Army closed in on Warsaw, Łukasiewicz and his wife fled west to Germany in 1944 in an attempt to reach Switzerland, where an acquaintance of theirs was based. Their plan was unsuccessful, however, and after the war the couple was faced with a dilemma.
“We could not return to Poland, because neither I nor my wife were communists, and besides, I would not be able, as a philosopher, to propagate dialectical materialism in a communist university,” Łukasiewicz wrote of their predicament.
After finding a temporary job teaching logic at the Polish Scientific Institute in Brussels, it was in Belgium where Łukasiewicz’s fortunes would change following an encounter with an enigmatic man described by Łukasiewicz as a “Polish-speaking Irishman in a Polish officer’s uniform”.
He encouraged the academic to travel to Ireland, citing the Irish government’s willingness to offer support and employment to displaced scholars who could contribute to the intellectual development of the country.
With nowhere else to go, Łukasiewicz, then in his late 60s, and his wife arrived in Dublin in March 1946. The couple, who spoke little English, were initially supported by the Irish Red Cross, and it was not long before word of Łukasiewicz’s presence in Ireland reached academic and political circles in the country.
A new life in Ireland
He was soon received by Joseph Walshe, secretary of the Department of External Affairs, and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Éamon de Valera, who assured him that he would take care of his fate in Ireland.
In the autumn of 1946, Łukasiewicz was appointed professor of mathematical logic at the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), a position created specifically for him and funded by the Irish government.
Having improved his English considerably since his arrival, he delivered his first public lecture in Ireland at the RIA on 18 November 1946. The event was prominently and positively reported on by the Irish Press newspaper, which had been founded by de Valera.
In his correspondence with fellow Polish logician Józef Maria Bocheński, Łukasiewicz wrote highly of the RIA, comparing it to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland’s oldest institute of higher education. He believed that the RIA served as a neutral ground where both Catholic and Protestant intellectuals could debate and work on academic matters together.
In Dublin, Łukasiewicz was able to continue his research, and reconstruct and publish the work that had been destroyed in Warsaw. He conducted new research in the field of symbolic logic and completed his magnum opus, Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic.
During his time in Ireland, he also lectured on mathematical logic at Queen’s University Belfast and Aristotle’s syllogism at University College Dublin and received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin.
In 1950, Łukasiewicz met Alan Turing while in Manchester giving a lecture at the city’s university. The two men admired each other greatly and were interested in the applications of each other’s work. Łukasiewicz considered Turing the “most outstanding of today’s English logicians” and the two spoke on the principles of Łukasiewicz’s parenthesis-free symbolism.
“This Dublin period can be considered as one of the most fruitful periods in his scientific career,” Łukasiewicz’s former student Bolesław Sobociński would go on to say.
While the Łukasiewiczes’ gratitude to their host nation was always made clear, life in exile was of course not without hardship. In letters to Bocheński, Łukasiewicz complained of occasional instances of xenophobia, quarrels with their landlord, and longing for their life back in Warsaw before the war.
However, as long as communist rule was in place, Łukasiewicz had no desire to return to Poland. He wrote that he had no information from Poland and that, although Warsaw University had his address, they had not reached out to him.
He was anxious to contact his colleagues in Warsaw out of fear for their safety for being in contact with “fascists”, referring to his belief that the communist authorities would have considered him an enemy of the people for his participation in Paderewski’s cabinet.
Łukasiewicz remained optimistic, though, that the strides made by his fellow exiled Polish academics would serve their cause, no matter how they may have been viewed by authorities back home. “I think that what will serve our cause, Poles in exile, the best, is if we show the world how much they can learn from us,” he wrote.
📣New exhibition! Discover the captivating story of Professor Jan Łukasiewicz : a leading Polish philosopher and logician who found post-war refuge in Ireland. One of the 20th century's leading figures of European science!
Presented by @PLinIreland and hosted by @RIAdawson pic.twitter.com/TcHuOZuhS8— Royal Irish Academy Library (@Library_RIA) October 12, 2022
After becoming increasingly frail in his later life, with heart problems believed to have been brought on by his wartime hardships, Łukasiewicz died on 13 February 1956 after suffering a third major coronary thrombosis following an operation to remove gallstones.
At his funeral were de Valera, the president of the RIA, and the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, a measure of the high regard Łukasiewicz continued to be held in.
Łukasiewicz was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin, with “far from dear Lwów and Poland” engraved on his tombstone. His new resting place, on the Avenue of the Distinguished at Powązki cemetery in Warsaw, seems a more appropriate setting in the country he so missed.
The repatriation of Łukasiewicz’s remains comes after the remains of three exiled presidents of Poland – who saw themselves as the rightful heads of state during the communist period – were also brought to Poland from the UK earlier that month.
Łukasiewicz’s gravestone in Ireland (AleksanderDąbrowicz1526/Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Łukasiewicz’s legacy of not just academic achievement but of overcoming hardship makes him an important figure, says Kinsella:
He was such an important intellectual public figure in his own country, and then to go through the upheaval of not just one, but two world wars, and then having to flee his country and make a new home. To me, that just speaks of somebody who was an incredible person, not just academically but with strength of spirit and strength of character.
Like so many Poles of his era, Łukasiewicz’s life was shaped by the upheaval that rocked his homeland and, also like so many others, it was that upheaval that in turn shaped his achievements.
Special thanks to Nikola Sękowska-Moroney and the Polish Embassy in Dublin, Dr. Eoin Kinsella, Dr. Jacek Jadacki, and the Royal Irish Academy.
Main image credit: Rafael Photograph
Anna Hackett is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a recent graduate of European Studies from Trinity College Dublin and has had previous journalistic experience with the Irish Independent News & Media group.
