This is a list of Polish inventors and discoverers. The following incomplete list comprises people from Poland and of Polish origin, and also people of predominantly Polish heritage, in alphabetical order of surname.
Henryk Arctowski: scientist and explorer. Living in exile for a large part of his life, he was one of the first persons to reach Antarctica during winter and became an internationally renowned meteorologist.[4]
Stefan Banach: considered one of the world's most important and influential 20th-century mathematicians, creator of Banach space. He was one of the founders of modern functional analysis, and an original member of the Lwów School of Mathematics. His major work was the 1932 book, Théorie des opérations linéaires (Theory of Linear Operations), the first monograph on the general theory of functional analysis.
Mieczysław G. Bekker: co-authored the general idea and vitally contributed to the design and construction of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) used by NASA in missions Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17 on the Moon. He was the author of several patented inventions in the area of off-the-road vehicles, including those for extraterrestrial use.[6]
Benedict of Poland: Polish Franciscan friar, explorer, and interpreter, participant of the pioneering European trip to the capital of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century.
Edmund Biernacki: physician, the first one to note a relationship between the sedimentation rate of red blood cells in a human blood sample and the general condition of the organism. This method is now known as the Biernacki Reaction.
Michał Borysiekiewicz: invented the first "electronic eye" for blind people.
Michał Boym: 17th-century Jesuit missionary, scientist and explorer, who was the first in Europe to describe Korea as a peninsula, as until then it was believed to be an island, and the first in Europe to establish the factual location of a number of Chinese cities and the Great Wall of China.[7]
Josef Božek: managed to put into operation one of the first steam engines in the Czech lands.
Tytus Liwiusz Burattini: inventor of the micrometer.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie: conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences – physics and chemistry. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.[11]
Maksymilian Faktorowicz: founder of the Max Factor cosmetics company, popularized the term "make-up", had perfected the first cosmetic specifically created for motion picture use—a thinner greasepaint in cream form and largely developed the modern cosmetics industry in the United States.[21]
Kazimierz Fajans: physical chemist, pioneer in the science of radioactivity and the discoverer of chemical element protactinium.[22]
Casimir Funk:, biochemist, the first to formulate (1912) the concept and the term of vitamins originally calling them "vital amins"/"vit- amins" discovered first vitamins, i.e B1 [23][24]
Leo Gerstenzang: Polish-American inventor who in 1923 created the first contemporary cotton swab or Q-Tips.
Walery Jaworski: one of the pioneers of gastroenterology in Poland who made one of the first observations of Helicobacter pylori and published those findings in 1899 in a book titled Podręcznik chorób żołądka (Handbook of Gastric Diseases).[29]
Adam Adamandy Kochański: mathematician, physicist, clockmaker, who found an approximation of π today called the Kochański's Approximation.[30] He also suggested replacing the clock's pendulum with a spring, constructed a clock with a magnetic pendulum, and was the author of the world's first systematic paper on the construction of clocks.
Stefan Kudelski: audio engineer known for creating the Nagra series of professional audio recorders later sold to British BBC, American stations NBC, ABC, CBS, but also plenty of radio stations including famous Radio Luxembourg. Kudelski received prestigious Oscar Awards in 1965, 1977, 1978, and 1990. He also won two Emmy Awards in 1984 and 1986.[36]
Wojciech Kurtyka: mountaineer, alpinist, one of the alpine style climbing pioneers, after climbing through the "Shining Wall" on Gasherbrum IV the Climbing magazine declared beat the wall to get the greatest achievement of mountaineering in the twentieth century.
Henryk Manguski: a telecommunications engineer who worked for Motorola in Chicago. He was the inventor of the first Walkie-Talkies and one of the authors of his company success in the fields of radio communication.[43]
Jan Nagórski: engineer and pioneer of aviation, the first person to fly an airplane in the Arctic and the first aviator to perform a loop with a flying boat.
Karol Olszewski: chemist, the first (alongside Zygmunt Wróblewski) to liquefy oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a stable state (not, as had been the case up to then, in a dynamic state in the transitional form as vapour) (1833).[47]
Bohdan Paczyński: astronomer, credited with the development of a new method of detecting space objects and establishing their mass using the gravitational lenses effect.[49]
Kazimierz Prószyński: patented the first film camera, the Pleograph, before the Lumière brothers, and later went on to improve the cinema projector for the Gaumont company, as well as invent the widely used hand-held Aeroscope camera.[52]
Jerzy Rudlicki: aerospace engineer and pilot. He is best known for his inventing and patenting of the V-tail in 1930, which is an aircraft tail configuration that combines the rudder and elevators into one system.[58]
Ludwik Rydygier: surgeon, who performed the first in Poland and second in the world successful surgical removal of the pylorus in a patient suffering from stomach cancer, and the first peptic ulcerresection in the world.
Andrew Schally: endocrinologist and Nobel Prize laureate (1977)[59] whose research contributed to the discovery that the hypothalamus controls hormone production and release by the pituitary gland, which controls the regulation of other hormones in the body.[60]
Michael Sendivogius: pioneer of chemistry, who developed ways of purification and creation of various acids, metals and other chemical compounds, and discovered that air is not a single substance and contains a life-giving substance—later called oxygen.[61]
Kazimierz Siemienowicz: military engineer, one of pioneers of rocketry, author of Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima, a work that served as the principal artillery manual in Europe from the mid-16th to the mid-18th centuries, also containing the first printed design of a multistage rocket.
Maria Siemionow: transplant surgeon and scientist who led a team of eight surgeons through the world's first near-total face transplant.[64]
Josephus Struthius: professor of medicine and personal doctor of Polish kings, who was among the first to provide a visual representation of the human pulse and used it for diagnostic purposes.
Jan Szczepanik: inventor, with several hundred patents and over 50 discoveries to his name; his inventions founded ground for radio and TV broadcasting.[67]
Zygmunt Wróblewski: chemist: the first (alongside Karol Olszewski) to liquefy oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a stable state (not, as had been the case up to then, in a dynamic state in the transitional form as vapour) (1833).[82]
Achmatowicz, O.; Bukowski, P.; Szechner, B.; Zwierzchowska, Z.; Zamojski, A. (1 January 1971). "Synthesis of methyl 2,3-dideoxy-DL-alk-2-enopyranosides from furan compounds: A general approach to the total synthesis of monosaccharides". Tetrahedron. 27 (10): 1973–1996. doi:10.1016/S0040-4020(01)98229-8. ISSN0040-4020.
Donachie, Stuart P. (1 January 1994). "Henryk Arctowski station: Mixing science and tourism". Annals of Tourism Research. 21 (2): 333–343. doi:10.1016/0160-7383(94)90049-3. ISSN0160-7383.
Danysz, M.; Pniewski, J. (March 1953). "Delayed disintegration of a heavy nuclear fragment: I". The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. 44 (350): 348–350. doi:10.1080/14786440308520318.
Altman, Lawrence K. (22 July 1999). "Ludwik Gross, a Trailblazer in Cancer Research, Dies at 94". New York Times. Archived from the original on 22 November 2022. Retrieved 6 May 2023. Dr. Ludwik Gross, who influenced cancer research by showing that viruses could cause cancers in animals, died on Monday at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He was 94 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The cause was stomach cancer, said his daughter, Dr. Augusta H. Gross.
Wang, Jin-Shan; Matyjaszewski, Krzysztof (May 1995). "Controlled/"living" radical polymerization. Atom transfer radical polymerization in the presence of transition-metal complexes". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 117 (20): 5614–5615. Bibcode:1995JAChS.117.5614W. doi:10.1021/ja00125a035.
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