Aleksander Pełczyński
Aleksander "Olek" Pełczyński was a Polish mathematician.
Pełczyński studied mathematics from 1950 to 1956 at the University of Warsaw and received there his doctorate in 1958 under Stanisław Mazur with dissertation Własności izomorficzne przestrzeni Banacha związane ze słabą zbieżnością bezwarunkową szeregów. From 1967 to 2002 he worked at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 1967 he was a member of the editorial staff of the journal Studia Mathematica.
Pełczyński's main field of research was functional analysis, especially the theory of Banach spaces. In 1961 he received the Stefan Banach Prize and in 1996 the Stefan Banach Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The Bessaga-Pelczynski Selection Principle and the Pelczynsk Decomposition Method are associatedn with his name.
In 1966 in Moscow he was an Invited Speaker of the ICM. In 1983 in Warsaw Pełczyński was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM. In 1986 he was elected a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. His doctoral students include Nicole Tomczak-Jaegermann and Stanisław Szarek. He died in December 2012 and was buried in Warsaw.
