ABSTRACT
Throughout much of the year 1984 professorial and political concerns could not be uppermost in the author's mind: In May, his brother Stan died very suddenly, just one day after returning from a European trip. After the war the "Scottish book" reemerged, and Stan was overjoyed to turn what had been loose-leaf notebooks into a printed book which has since been highly prized by the international mathematical community. A memorial to the vanished Lwów school of mathematicians, as well as to the continuing and robust Polish scientific culture. Some authors were to claim that it was Stan's contribution that was fundamental to proving the feasibility of the construction of the H-bomb, rather than that of Edward Teller, long-known as the "father" of the bomb. He would have been thrilled by the recently announced solution of the celebrated "Fermat's Last Theorem" that had beguiled mathematicians for three hundred years.
