nLab Kazimierz Kuratowski

Kazimierz Kuratowski (b. February 2, 1896, d. June 18, 1980) was a Polish mathematician who worked primarily in general topology and mathematical logic.

He is probably best known for a celebrated theorem in graph theory: that a graph $G$ is planar iff neither the complete graph $K_5$ on $5$ vertices nor the complete bipartite graph $K_{3, 3}$ on a pair of $3$-element sets appear as edge subdivisions of subgraphs of $G$ (closely related to Wagner’s theorem that this is the case iff neither $K_5$ nor $K_{3, 3}$ appear as graph minors of $G$).

• wikipedia entry

Selected writings

Early discussion of topology/topological spaces:

• Kazimierz Kuratowski, Sur l’opération Ā de l’Analysis Situs, Fundamenta Mathematicae 3 (1922) 182–199 [doi:10.4064/fm-3-1-182-199]

See also:

• C. Kuratowski, Sur la notion d’ensemble fini , Fund. Math. I (1920) pp.130-131. (pdf)

• Casimir Kuratowski (1930), “Sur le problème des courbes gauches en Topologie”, Fundamenta Mathematicae, 15 (1):271-283. (eudml)

Related entries

• closed subspace

• finite set

category: people