Lucjan Böttcher
| Lucjan Emil Böttcher | |
|---|---|
| Born | Warsaw |
| Died | Lwów |
| Nationality | Poland |
| Citizenship | Poland |
| Alma mater | Lwów Polytechnic School, University of Leipzig |
| Known for | Böttcher's equation |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Beiträge zu der Theorie der Iterationsrechnung (1898) |
| Doctoral advisor | Sophus Lie |
Lucjan Emil Böttcher (1872–1937) was a Polish mathematician who worked in Lvov in the beginning of the 20th century.
Böttcher was born on January 21, 1872, in Warsaw, Poland. He attended private schools in Warsaw and graduated from the classical gymnasium in Łomża in 1893, after which he entered the Imperial University of Warsaw in the Division of Mathematics and Physics. At the time, Russian was the language of instruction at the university, as Warsaw was under Russian rule.
He was expelled from the university for participation in patriotic (anti-Russian) demonstrations in 1894. He moved to Lwów Polytechnic School, where he obtained a so-called half-diploma in 1897. Desiring to continue his mathematical education, he moved to Leipzig, where he worked under Sophus Lie. His doctoral thesis, published in 1898, was titled Beiträge zu der Theorie der Iterationsrechnung.
Böttcher married Maria Wolle in 1900, and had four children.
Following his doctorate, Böttcher returned to Lwów to take up a junior position at the Lwów Polytechnic School. By 1911, he was licensed to teach (venia legendi) at the school, and he offered courses on theoretical mechanics as well as mathematics for engineering. All his attempts to obtain habilitation at the University of Lwów failed, however. This meant that he was not permitted to guide doctoral students.
Böttcher was a member of the Polish Mathematical Society. He took seriously his role of an educator, encouraging the introduction of differential and integral calculus at school level, and writing several high-school textbooks. One example is Principles of Elementary Algebra, adapted to the curriculum in the Polish Kingdom (1911), which followed the so-called Meran programme that aimed to teach students to think in terms of functions.
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