Background
Tadeusz Banachiewicz was born on February 13, 1882, in Warsaw, Poland. He was the younger son of Arthur Banachiewicz, a landowner in the Warsaw district, and Sophia Rzeszotarska.
ul. Kopernika 27, Krakow, Poland
The Tadeusz Banachiewicz`s memory plate.
Tadeusz Banachiewicz (13 February 1882, Warsaw – 17 November 1954, Kraków) was a Polish astronomer, mathematician, geodesist.
Professor Banachiewicz wearing a hat in the style of Carl Gauss.
Tadeusz Banachiewicz with his colleagues.
Tadeusz Banachiewicz (second from left) was a member of the Polish delegation during the debates of the International Astronomical Union in Paris.
Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland
Banachiewicz received his bachelor’s degree in astronomy in 1904 from Warsaw University.
Moscow University, Mosow, Russia
In 1910 he received the master’s degree in astronomy from Moscow University.
Astronomer geodesist mathematician
Tadeusz Banachiewicz was born on February 13, 1882, in Warsaw, Poland. He was the younger son of Arthur Banachiewicz, a landowner in the Warsaw district, and Sophia Rzeszotarska.
Banachiewicz received his bachelor’s degree in astronomy in 1904 from Warsaw University, where one of his astronomical papers had earlier won a gold medal. He continued his studies in Gottingen under Schwarzchild and in Pulkovo. In 1910 he received the master’s degree in astronomy from Moscow University. Later in life he was the recipient of Doctor Honoris Causa titles from the University of Warsaw, the University of Poznań and the University of Sofia in Bulgaria.
After his work in Pulkovo, Banachiewicz returned to Warsaw and became a junior assistant at the Warsaw Observatory in 1908-1909. And after receiving the master’s degree in astronomy from Moscow University in 1910, he soon afterward was appointed assistant at the Engelhardt Observatory, near Kazan, where he stayed until 1915. For the next three years he taught at Dorpat. He returned to Warsaw in 1918 and for a short time was Dozent of geodesy at the Warsaw Polytechnic High School. Toward the end of that year he accepted the professorship of astronomy at the University of Krakow and directorship of the Krakow Observatory. He spent the rest of his fife in Krakow, the only interruption occurring in the winter of 1939/ 1940, when the Krakow faculty was taken to the Gestapo concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin.
Banachiewicz’s work concerned many important problems of astronomy, geodesy, geophysics, mathematics, mechanics, and numerical calculus. His principle of repeated verification made his 240 published papers safe from errors. His most important astronomical and geodetical work was theoretical. As early as 1906 a paper of his that dealt with Lagrange’s three-body problem was presented to the Paris Academy by Poincare. The paper, “Uber die Anwendbarkeit der Gyldin-Brendelschen Storungstheorie auf die Jupiternahen Planetoiden,” gave a brilliant analysis of Gylden-Brendel’s theory, pointing out its illusiveness when applied to small planets in the vicinity of Jupiter.
He also published several papers on Gauss’s equation and gave useful tables to facilitate its numerical solution. These tables have been reprinted in J. Bauschinger and G. Stracke’s Tafeln zur theoretischen Astronomie.
Banachiewicz paid considerable attention to multiple solutions in the determination of parabolic orbits. Legendre, Charlier, Vogel, and others claimed to have solved the question in the sense that the two equations obtained in the process of determining a parabolic orbit from three observations lead to a single solution. Banachiewicz showed that they were basing their reasoning on Lambert’s equation, which fails in certain circumstances. In these exceptional cases three solutions are possible, as he demonstrated with a fictitious numerical example.
Banachiewicz’s investigations into the theory of linear equations produced interesting applications of the cracovian method to such problems as the reduction of astrographic plates; here cracovian formulas led to a general solution that comprised the formulas of Turner and those of the dependency method. He also simplified the classical method of least squares. The cracovian method is well suited to numerical computation. Its importance lies in the fact that the unknowns and their weights are found simultaneously during the process of computation, which is not the case in Gauss’s method.
Banachiewicz was not only a prominent theorist but also a gifted and assiduous observer. While a student he promoted observations of occultations of stars by the moon, insisting on their importance for the study of the moon’s motion, and developed a purely mathematical method for predicting occultations of stars that had great advantages over the graphical methods. He was also interested in occultations of stars by planets. His ephemerides drew attention to the occultation of 6G Librae by Ganymede, Jupiter’s III satellite, on 13 August 1911, which was unique in the history of astronomy because it was the only occultation of a bright star by a planet’s satellite to be predicted and observed.
While in Kazan he carried out very precise observations of the moon’s libration with a four-inch heliometer. Banachiewicz attached much importance to observations of eclipsing variables and introduced them into the working program of the Krakow Observatory. He considered eclipsing binaries the clue to many important questions of the sidereal universe and insisted on gathering observational material for “the future Kepler of eclipsing binaries.”
Since he was interested in higher geodesy, Banachiewicz took part in gravimetric observations when he was at Kazan. He later organized gravimetric observations and first-order leveling in Poland. He was Poland’s representative to the Baltic Geodetic Commission. At its 1928 meeting Banachiewicz reported the results obtained by the Polish expedition to Lapland (12 June 1927) in timing a solar eclipse by his “chrono-cinematographic” method. This method makes use of Baily’s beads and thus greatly increases the number of observed contacts of the two heavenly bodies. Thus the difference in right ascension of moon-sun could be established for the Lapland eclipse with a mean error of ±0"04.
Banachiewicz proposed to use total eclipses for “lunar triangulations” capable of connecting distant points of the earth’s surface.
In astrophysics Banachiewicz was especially interested in photometric problems. Besides the photometry of variable stars he was interested in the illumination of planetary disks and of our sky.
He authored approximately 180 research papers and modified the method of determining parabolic orbits.
In 1922 Banachiewicz became a member of PAU (Polska Akademia Umiejętności) and from 1932 to 1938 was a member and the vice-president of the International Astronomical Union. He was also a member and the first President of the Polish Astronomical Society, the vice-president of the Geodetic Committee of The Baltic States and, from 1952 to his death, a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
In 1931 Tadeusz Banachiewicz was married to Laura de Sołohub Dikyj.