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Kazimierz Bartel was born and brought up in Lwów in Poland. Lwów is the Polish name for the city which was also known as Lemberg in German, Lvov in Russian, and today is known as Lviv in Ukraine. One of the reasons for the many variants of the city's name is a long history in which it had been part of different countries at different periods in its history. In fact it became part of Austria when Poland was partitioned in 1772 and it was still a part of that country when Bartel was born there - so officially he was born in Lemberg. He attended schools in that city and, after graduating from secondary school, entered the Mechanical Engineering Department of Lwów Polytechnic.
In 1907 Bartel graduated from Lwów Polytechnic. He was appointed as an assistant in descriptive geometry following his graduation, then in 1914 he was made a professor at the Polytechnic. Now, of course, this was a period of conflict across much of Europe and it began with an Austrian declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Russia supported Serbia, mobilising its army on 30 July, and Germany then declared war on Russia on 1 August, and two days later on France as well. Bartel was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army for the duration of World War I. For Bartel, as for many Poles, the war was seen as a positive step which could lead to Poland regaining its sovereignty.
After the war ended with the surrender of the Central Powers, Poland proclaimed itself independent on 11 November 1918. Bartel returned to his professorship at Lwów Polytechnic and in fact his book Descriptive geometry (Polish) was published around this time. We will say more about this text later in this biography but for the moment let us continue to describe the dramatic events which took place in Poland in general, and Lwów in particular. This first of these was a short-lived western Ukrainian republic which arose in Lviv (to give it its Ukrainian name) in late 1918. The Poles, however, drove Ukrainian troops out of the city and regained control. Bartel took a very active part in this defence of Lwów, commanding the railway troops in their battles with the Ukrainian army.
At this stage Poland was an independent state by its declaration of 1918, but its borders had not been agreed. In 1919 Bartel gave up his professorship of mathematics at Lwów Polytechnic to assist in reforming Poland with a democratic constitution. He served as Minister of Railways from 1919 until 1922. A move was made towards settling the Polish borders with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, but Poland attempted to recover its 1772 borders by military action in the Lithuanian Vilnius territory. As Polish troops advanced on Kiev in March 1920 there was a Soviet response which began the Polish-Soviet war. This ended with the Treaty of Riga on 18 March 1921 following a rather remarkable Polish victory in the Battle of Warsaw (known as the "Miracle on the Vistula"). The boundaries of the Polish state were then set.
Bartel became a member of Poland's Sejm, its parliament, in 1922. Jozef Pilsudski, who had been head of the military department of the Polish council of state during World War I, had initially been in control of Poland at the end of hostilities and had arranged for the German troops to leave the country. He had then taken a back seat while the Polish government began its task of running an independent Poland. However, by 1926 Poland was suffering an economic depression and Pilsudski became disillusioned with the way that the system of government was working. On 12 May 1926, at the head of a few regiments, he marched on Warsaw and took control in a military coup. Two days later the whole Polish government resigned and the Polish parliament elected Pilsudski as President. However, he refused this role and one of his friends, Ignacy Moscicki, was elected President. Pilsudski became Minister of Defence and Bartel was made prime minister of Poland.
From 1926 until 1930, Bartel was prime minister of Poland, then he decided to retire from politics and return to his professorship of mathematics at Lwów Polytechnic. He was elected rector of the Polytechnic and, also in 1930, he was elected as President of the Polish Mathematical Society. He took over from Sierpinski, and he held the presidency until 1932 when Mazurkiewicz became President. He was also honoured by Lwów Polytechnic in 1930 when they awarded him an honorary doctorate. During these years when Bartel was again an academic, he applied his knowledge and skills in geometry to a historical study of perspective in European painting. He lectured on this topic and his lecture series was published.
Let us return to make some comments on his book Descriptive geometry (Polish). The first edition was published in 1918, as we mentioned above, and a second edition appeared in 1922. After Bartel's death, a third edition was prepared by Antoni Plamitzer who only made minor changes to the text of the third edition. In 1958 a fourth edition was published, being simply a reprint of the third edition. N A Court writes in a review:-
The book is a comprehensive course in descriptive geometry, including what is called engineering drawing and concluding with the theory of shadows (pp. 382 - 422). The introductory chapter reminds the reader of the basic theorems (and their proofs) of solid geometry that will be made use of in the text. Throughout the book care is taken to present the theoretical foundations on which are based the solutions of the problems considered. The methods follow the classical Mongean lines.
In 1937 Bartel returned to politics when he was appointed a Senator of Poland. After the outbreak of World War II, Lwów was seized by the Soviet Union in 1939 but then occupied by German troops. In 1940 Bartel was appointed to Moscow and offered a seat in the Soviet parliament. However, he refused the offer. In 1941 he was arrested and imprisoned in Lwów. He was shot by the Germans on 26 July 1941 on the orders of Heinrich Himmler.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
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