Ewa Ligocka

Ewa Ligocka (1947–2022) was a Polish mathematician specializing in complex analysis, and a political activist.

Life and work

Ligocka was born in Katowice on October 13, 1947, the daughter of Polish photography critic and historian Alfred Ligocki. As a high school student under the tutelage of Teodor Paliczka, she competed for Poland in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1965. She earned a master's degree at the University of Warsaw in 1970, and completed a Ph.D. there in 1973 under the supervision of Wiesław Żelazko. During this period, her research concerned the theory of analytic functions on topological vector spaces. The story goes that, in 1972, she was the one to pluck and cook the live goose given to Per Enflo as the prize for solving Mazur's goose problem.

She continued as a researcher at the University of Warsaw. As an assistant professor in 1976, she signed an open letter of protest regarding the June 1976 protests in Radom and Ursus. Despite the efforts of other mathematicians to protect her, this protest led to her transfer to a branch campus of the university in Białystok and then, in 1977, her dismissal from the university.

Meanwhile, she had begun working with Maciej Skwarczyński on the Bergman kernel, and by 1978 she began her research with Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Steven R. Bell on Fefferman's theorem on the smooth extension of biholomorphisms to the boundaries of their domains. This work, published in Inventiones Mathematicae in 1980, already created a stir in Polish mathematics in the late 1970s, and in 1979 she was hired by Czesław Olech as a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, without any political restrictions.

She completed a habilitation in 1986, and in 1992 returned to the University of Warsaw as an associate professor. She was given the degree of professor in 1994. She retired in 2008, and died on October 28, 2022.

Recognition

Ligocka was the 1986 recipient of the Stanisław Zaremba Grand Prize of the Polish Mathematical Society. She and Steven R. Bell received the 1991 Stefan Bergman Prize of the American Mathematical Society, given for their work on Fefferman's theorem.