Kuratowski was born on 2nd Feb 1896 in Warsaw, Poland. When he left secondary school, he decided that he wanted to become an engineer and he studied at The University of Glasgow, in Scotland. In 1917, Janiszewski and Mazurkiewicz conducted a topology seminar which stimulated Kuratowski's interests in this field and he wrote On the Definitions in Mathematics. After graduating in 1919, Kuratowski undertook doctoral studies working under Janiszewski and Mazurkiewicz.  In 1921, Kuratowski was awarded his doctorate, but sadly his supervisor Janiszewski had died in 1920. Janiszewski had been the leader in a move to set up the new journal Fundamenta Mathematicae and the first volume, which appeared in 1920, contained a joint paper Sur les Continus Indécomposable by Janiszewski and Kuratowski.

Kuratowski was appointed as a professor at the Technical University of Lvov in 1927. At Lvov, Kuratowski worked with Banach and they answered some fundamental problems on measure theory. While spending a month at Princeton in 1936, he wrote a joint paper with von Neumann. Kuratowski's main work was in the area of topology and set theory. He used the notion of a limit point to give closure axioms to define a topological space. His 1930 work on non-planar graphs is of fundamental importance in graph theory and computer science. He showed that a necessary and sufficient condition for a graph G to be planar is that it does not contain a subgraph homeomorphic to either K5 or K3,3. He died on 18th June 1980 in Warsaw, Poland.

Additional information: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Kuratowski.html

"List of papers by K Kuratowski published during 1918-1958 (Polish)", Wiadomosci matematyczne (2) 3 (1960), 245-250.

E Marczewski, "On the papers of Kazimierz Kuratowski in set theory and measure theory (Polish)", Wiadomosci matematyczne (2) 3 (1960), 239-244.

Photo courtesy of: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Thumbnails/Kuratowski.jpg