7 ms·

Scottish Café

173 points by benbreen 5y ago

armSixtyFour 5y ago
It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find a pdf of the "The Scottish book", it looks as though any copy of it is over 150 USD.
- miles 5y ago
  There are a number of PDF versions (and much more) linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book : English version of Scottish book http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-szkocka3ang.pdf http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-sz... Manuscript of Scottish book https://web.archive.org/web/20180428090844/http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-szkocka1pol.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180428090844/http://kielich.am... The New Scottish Book PDFs https://web.archive.org/web/20170703172619/http://www.wmi.uni.wroc.pl/New_Scottish_Book https://web.archive.org/web/20170703172619/http://www.wmi.un...
  - armSixtyFour 5y ago
    Thank you!
KhoomeiK 5y ago
Great metaphor for how to create an innovative, collaborative culture.
the_local_host 5y ago
People back then knew that "hanging out" in a public place was worthwhile. I wish there was a model of public place where you and your pals could buy breakfast+lunch, or lunch+dinner, and occupy the table for the whole time in-between. Bars let you stay for long periods, but after three or four hours everyone ends up hammered, which is a different thing.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Rural family restaurants can handle this - or any place where you get outside of “heavy traffic” - just ask! As long as the table would have been empty anyway it doesn’t cost them extra - or leave a generous tip. One restaurant near me even has a plaque commemorating the group who has been eating lunch there for twenty years.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Starbucks is pretty good. I have never seen them kick anyone out for not buying enough. I miss the one that was near me.
  - y2bd 5y ago
    Folks can argue about the coffee quality as much as they want, but this why I love the Starbucks reserve roastery in Seattle. Decent chairs you can sit in for hours on end, and they blast AC in the summer. Noisy though.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    It probably depends on the city. My fiance who is in Singapore saw this article and mentioned on one occasion she was trying to work in a Starbucks with a classmate and they were asked to leave to make room for other customers. Singapore feels like a pretty crowded city though, many of the public spaces like the library are usually fully booked.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  I lived for close to four years in South Korea, working mostly from inside cafés and often spending an entire work day inside them. There were plenty that were set up for this - they often catered a student crowd that would hang out there for long durations studying (quite a few had open for 24 hours, too). It meant the drink prices were quite high since it was basically rent for a seat. Alternatively some dedicated study cafes would require a flat fee for a time duration and make drinks cheap instead. It was also fairly common to leave laptops plugged in and leave for half an hour to grab a meal elsewhere and come back.
- 5y ago
duxup 5y ago
I followed Wikipedia to "Scottish Book" and checked the names of the people involved... only to find a lot of them executed in WWII :(
- pjc50 5y ago
  Quite a lot of postwar US research lead can be attributed to that being where people survived. The thriving pre war intellectualism of Poland, Hungary and so on was largely obliterated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) : those who escaped.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    We often measure the loss in dollars, or more likely in number of lives. We don't have a measure for the vast amount of human capital that was destroyed in the second world war.
- chewz 5y ago
  Both Germans and Soviets did target Polish university professors as a matter of policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Prosecution_Book-Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Prosecution_Book-Polan... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_Krakau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_Krakau > Once more, the Führer must point out that the Poles can only have one master, and that is the German; two masters cannot and must not exist side by side; therefore, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia should be eliminated [umbringen]. This sounds harsh, but such are the laws of life.[] [] https://archive.org/details/adolfhitlerevilm0000altm https://archive.org/details/adolfhitlerevilm0000altm
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    To give an idea how these massacres wrecked Polish society, imagine British society (and Europe) if Germans with Austrians succeeded pursuing people from the Black Book [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(list) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(list)
johnthescott 5y ago
years ago, i took classes from dan mauldin, the editor of the Birkhäuser edition of the scottish book. our local scottish cafe was jim's diner. great hash browns.
jl6 5y ago
I could find no explanation of why it was called the Scottish café or what the link to Scotland might have been. Any ideas?
- chewz 5y ago
  Just the name of the cafe. Actually they have started in Cafe Roma but it has been too crowded and noisy and Banach decided to move to the other side of the street to Szkocka (Scottish) Cafe instead. Another reason Roma's owner wasn't keen to put on a tab. The Szkocka owner - Mr. Brettschneider was more friendly to mathematicians. https://histmag.org/Matematycy-z-kawiarni-Szkockiej-10433 https://histmag.org/Matematycy-z-kawiarni-Szkockiej-10433 The food in Szkocka wan't particularly good in Banach's opinion and some older mathematicians (Hugo Steinhaus) preferred bakery of Ludwik Zalewski at Akademicka 22 which was famous for excellent cakes delivered even to Warsaw by plane. Szkocka Cafe had been also frequented by journalists from Radio Lwów and cattle traders. The Cattle Market had been long time moved further from the city center but traders have liked Szkocka for closing trades. Szkocka was also the home of Klub Konstrukcjonalistów - a discussion and literary club focused on aesthetics. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klub_Konstrukcjonalist%C3%B3w https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klub_Konstrukcjonalist%C3%B3w Lwów had its share of coffee houses - "Cariton" (dawna "Muzeum" obok Muzeum Przemysłowego), "Centralna" (obecnie na rogu ul. Jagiellońskiej i Trzeciego Maja), "Europejska" (róg ul. Czarnieckiego i placu Bernardyńskiego), "Grand" (dawna "Teatralna"), "George", "Imperial" (ul. Legionów 5), "Louvre", "Palermo" (ul. Rutkowskiego, róg ul. Kamińskiego), "De la Paix", "Roma", "Rouge" (ul. Mikołaja), "Sewilla" (pl. Bernardyński, róg ul. Piekarskiej), "Union" ("Hostynnycia"), "Victoria" (ul. Rejtana), "Warszawa", "Wiedeńska" https://www.lwow.home.pl/rocznik/kawiarnie.html https://www.lwow.home.pl/rocznik/kawiarnie.html Google Translated > I also do not know where the idea of christening one of the cafes came from, according to the frescoes inside it, "Szkocka". Personally, this name reminds me of the famous jokes about skimpy Scotsmen and has always appealed - probably against the intentions of the host - to my savings, and maybe that is why it was partially closed for the time being. Google Translated > "Szkocka": it has always been the place with the most heterogeneous audience among all Lviv cafes. University professors and couples in love, old gossipers and lonely newspaper readers, bibliophiles and billiards, Jewish intelligentsia and students from the nearby Academic House, all states and spheres, classes and races, religions and preferences lived here in harmony, not with each other, but next to each other, filling an average of half of the room. So "Scotch" was always especially nice thanks to the fact that it was never too full and never too empty. Somehow its capacity was happily measured. Various secessionists from the neighboring "Roma" were a large part of its audience; those who for one reason or another - sometimes because of oppositionism itself, and sometimes as a result of overpopulation - left their home tables in "Roma" and emigrated to "Szkocka", trying to establish a new, independent existence here.
neiman 5y ago
Boy, this sounds awesome! As a mathematician who's gonna spend his next few months in Warsaw, is there anything there similar to this? I'd love some real, live math "arguments" over coffee!
- Tade0 5y ago
  Unfortunately this is now history. Nowadays people go hiking in the mountains instead and argue about math there. My algebra professor from college does a biannual kayaking trip. Not a mathematician, but I spent a few years during high school hiking with math students, talking mostly about math. We even went on a sort of pilgrimage to Lviv to see the grave of Stefan Banach and of course the Scottish Café. I still remember one actual conversation from that trip: -Where are we anyway? -In Ukraine. -What kind of response is that? -The most precise I could give.
  - neiman 5y ago
    Lol. Discussing math while hiking is great, but regular meetings in cafes are a whole different animal. There's something about the repetitivity, the short meetings, the "mundane" atmosphere etc, which is good for me for math discussions. Hiking trips are too "special" to bring the same experience.
    - cpach 5y ago
      It might not be possible now during the pandemic. But under normal times it could have worked to start a math group at Meetup.com and then spread that link via Twitter, Facebook, local universities etc. As a starting point 2-3 persons could hold flash talks that could spawn off into interesting discussions. A local sponsor could make sure that some food and beverages are available to the attendants. Just a thought.
    - neiman 5y ago
      Good idea, I may try that.
    - sidpatil 5y ago
varispeed 5y ago
Juliusz Schauder - was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential equations and mathematical physics. > He was executed by the Gestapo, probably in October 1943. Stanisław Saks (30 December 1897 – 23 November 1942) was a Polish mathematician and university tutor, a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics, known primarily for his membership in the Scottish Café circle, an extensive monograph on the theory of integrals, his works on measure theory and the Vitali–Hahn–Saks theorem. > Arrested in November 1942, he was executed on 23 November 1942 by the German Gestapo in Warsaw. Thankfully most of them seem to have survived the war. It's a shame that these days people are still into these murderous systems like communism and national socialism. We never learn.
- yunohn 5y ago
  > murderous systems like communism and national socialism To be fair, democracy is also very murderous. Western countries are constantly killing thousands of civilians abroad in the name of freedom. * “UN says more civilians killed by allies than insurgents” - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49165676 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49165676 * “Costs of War” - https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human
bainsfather 5y ago
Stan Ulam's autobiography - Adventures of a Mathematician - talks a bit about this, from his early days in Lwow. It's a good book about interesting times and interesting people - if this wikipedia article interests you, then maybe the book will also.
barry27 5y ago
What happened to the original book?

173 points by benbreen 5y ago

It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find a pdf of the "The Scottish book", it looks as though any copy of it is over 150 USD.

miles 5y ago
There are a number of PDF versions (and much more) linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book : English version of Scottish book http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-szkocka3ang.pdf http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-sz... Manuscript of Scottish book https://web.archive.org/web/20180428090844/http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-szkocka1pol.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180428090844/http://kielich.am... The New Scottish Book PDFs https://web.archive.org/web/20170703172619/http://www.wmi.uni.wroc.pl/New_Scottish_Book https://web.archive.org/web/20170703172619/http://www.wmi.un...
- armSixtyFour 5y ago
  Thank you!

KhoomeiK 5y ago

Great metaphor for how to create an innovative, collaborative culture.

the_local_host 5y ago

People back then knew that "hanging out" in a public place was worthwhile. I wish there was a model of public place where you and your pals could buy breakfast+lunch, or lunch+dinner, and occupy the table for the whole time in-between. Bars let you stay for long periods, but after three or four hours everyone ends up hammered, which is a different thing.

bombcar 5y ago
Rural family restaurants can handle this - or any place where you get outside of “heavy traffic” - just ask! As long as the table would have been empty anyway it doesn’t cost them extra - or leave a generous tip. One restaurant near me even has a plaque commemorating the group who has been eating lunch there for twenty years.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Starbucks is pretty good. I have never seen them kick anyone out for not buying enough. I miss the one that was near me.
- y2bd 5y ago
  Folks can argue about the coffee quality as much as they want, but this why I love the Starbucks reserve roastery in Seattle. Decent chairs you can sit in for hours on end, and they blast AC in the summer. Noisy though.
- noobermin 5y ago
  It probably depends on the city. My fiance who is in Singapore saw this article and mentioned on one occasion she was trying to work in a Starbucks with a classmate and they were asked to leave to make room for other customers. Singapore feels like a pretty crowded city though, many of the public spaces like the library are usually fully booked.
sho_hn 5y ago
I lived for close to four years in South Korea, working mostly from inside cafés and often spending an entire work day inside them. There were plenty that were set up for this - they often catered a student crowd that would hang out there for long durations studying (quite a few had open for 24 hours, too). It meant the drink prices were quite high since it was basically rent for a seat. Alternatively some dedicated study cafes would require a flat fee for a time duration and make drinks cheap instead. It was also fairly common to leave laptops plugged in and leave for half an hour to grab a meal elsewhere and come back.
5y ago

duxup 5y ago

I followed Wikipedia to "Scottish Book" and checked the names of the people involved... only to find a lot of them executed in WWII :(

pjc50 5y ago
Quite a lot of postwar US research lead can be attributed to that being where people survived. The thriving pre war intellectualism of Poland, Hungary and so on was largely obliterated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) : those who escaped.
- nicbou 5y ago
  We often measure the loss in dollars, or more likely in number of lives. We don't have a measure for the vast amount of human capital that was destroyed in the second world war.
chewz 5y ago
Both Germans and Soviets did target Polish university professors as a matter of policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Prosecution_Book-Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Prosecution_Book-Polan... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_Krakau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_Krakau > Once more, the Führer must point out that the Poles can only have one master, and that is the German; two masters cannot and must not exist side by side; therefore, all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia should be eliminated [umbringen]. This sounds harsh, but such are the laws of life.[] [] https://archive.org/details/adolfhitlerevilm0000altm https://archive.org/details/adolfhitlerevilm0000altm
- durnygbur 5y ago
  To give an idea how these massacres wrecked Polish society, imagine British society (and Europe) if Germans with Austrians succeeded pursuing people from the Black Book [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(list) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(list)

johnthescott 5y ago

years ago, i took classes from dan mauldin, the editor of the Birkhäuser edition of the scottish book. our local scottish cafe was jim's diner. great hash browns.

jl6 5y ago

I could find no explanation of why it was called the Scottish café or what the link to Scotland might have been. Any ideas?

chewz 5y ago
Just the name of the cafe. Actually they have started in Cafe Roma but it has been too crowded and noisy and Banach decided to move to the other side of the street to Szkocka (Scottish) Cafe instead. Another reason Roma's owner wasn't keen to put on a tab. The Szkocka owner - Mr. Brettschneider was more friendly to mathematicians. https://histmag.org/Matematycy-z-kawiarni-Szkockiej-10433 https://histmag.org/Matematycy-z-kawiarni-Szkockiej-10433 The food in Szkocka wan't particularly good in Banach's opinion and some older mathematicians (Hugo Steinhaus) preferred bakery of Ludwik Zalewski at Akademicka 22 which was famous for excellent cakes delivered even to Warsaw by plane. Szkocka Cafe had been also frequented by journalists from Radio Lwów and cattle traders. The Cattle Market had been long time moved further from the city center but traders have liked Szkocka for closing trades. Szkocka was also the home of Klub Konstrukcjonalistów - a discussion and literary club focused on aesthetics. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klub_Konstrukcjonalist%C3%B3w https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klub_Konstrukcjonalist%C3%B3w Lwów had its share of coffee houses - "Cariton" (dawna "Muzeum" obok Muzeum Przemysłowego), "Centralna" (obecnie na rogu ul. Jagiellońskiej i Trzeciego Maja), "Europejska" (róg ul. Czarnieckiego i placu Bernardyńskiego), "Grand" (dawna "Teatralna"), "George", "Imperial" (ul. Legionów 5), "Louvre", "Palermo" (ul. Rutkowskiego, róg ul. Kamińskiego), "De la Paix", "Roma", "Rouge" (ul. Mikołaja), "Sewilla" (pl. Bernardyński, róg ul. Piekarskiej), "Union" ("Hostynnycia"), "Victoria" (ul. Rejtana), "Warszawa", "Wiedeńska" https://www.lwow.home.pl/rocznik/kawiarnie.html https://www.lwow.home.pl/rocznik/kawiarnie.html Google Translated > I also do not know where the idea of christening one of the cafes came from, according to the frescoes inside it, "Szkocka". Personally, this name reminds me of the famous jokes about skimpy Scotsmen and has always appealed - probably against the intentions of the host - to my savings, and maybe that is why it was partially closed for the time being. Google Translated > "Szkocka": it has always been the place with the most heterogeneous audience among all Lviv cafes. University professors and couples in love, old gossipers and lonely newspaper readers, bibliophiles and billiards, Jewish intelligentsia and students from the nearby Academic House, all states and spheres, classes and races, religions and preferences lived here in harmony, not with each other, but next to each other, filling an average of half of the room. So "Scotch" was always especially nice thanks to the fact that it was never too full and never too empty. Somehow its capacity was happily measured. Various secessionists from the neighboring "Roma" were a large part of its audience; those who for one reason or another - sometimes because of oppositionism itself, and sometimes as a result of overpopulation - left their home tables in "Roma" and emigrated to "Szkocka", trying to establish a new, independent existence here.

neiman 5y ago

Boy, this sounds awesome! As a mathematician who's gonna spend his next few months in Warsaw, is there anything there similar to this? I'd love some real, live math "arguments" over coffee!

Tade0 5y ago
Unfortunately this is now history. Nowadays people go hiking in the mountains instead and argue about math there. My algebra professor from college does a biannual kayaking trip. Not a mathematician, but I spent a few years during high school hiking with math students, talking mostly about math. We even went on a sort of pilgrimage to Lviv to see the grave of Stefan Banach and of course the Scottish Café. I still remember one actual conversation from that trip: -Where are we anyway? -In Ukraine. -What kind of response is that? -The most precise I could give.
- neiman 5y ago
  Lol. Discussing math while hiking is great, but regular meetings in cafes are a whole different animal. There's something about the repetitivity, the short meetings, the "mundane" atmosphere etc, which is good for me for math discussions. Hiking trips are too "special" to bring the same experience.
  - cpach 5y ago
    It might not be possible now during the pandemic. But under normal times it could have worked to start a math group at Meetup.com and then spread that link via Twitter, Facebook, local universities etc. As a starting point 2-3 persons could hold flash talks that could spawn off into interesting discussions. A local sponsor could make sure that some food and beverages are available to the attendants. Just a thought.
  - neiman 5y ago
    Good idea, I may try that.
  - sidpatil 5y ago

varispeed 5y ago

Juliusz Schauder - was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential equations and mathematical physics. > He was executed by the Gestapo, probably in October 1943. Stanisław Saks (30 December 1897 – 23 November 1942) was a Polish mathematician and university tutor, a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics, known primarily for his membership in the Scottish Café circle, an extensive monograph on the theory of integrals, his works on measure theory and the Vitali–Hahn–Saks theorem. > Arrested in November 1942, he was executed on 23 November 1942 by the German Gestapo in Warsaw. Thankfully most of them seem to have survived the war. It's a shame that these days people are still into these murderous systems like communism and national socialism. We never learn.

yunohn 5y ago
> murderous systems like communism and national socialism To be fair, democracy is also very murderous. Western countries are constantly killing thousands of civilians abroad in the name of freedom. * “UN says more civilians killed by allies than insurgents” - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49165676 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49165676 * “Costs of War” - https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human

bainsfather 5y ago

Stan Ulam's autobiography - Adventures of a Mathematician - talks a bit about this, from his early days in Lwow. It's a good book about interesting times and interesting people - if this wikipedia article interests you, then maybe the book will also.

barry27 5y ago

What happened to the original book?