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Is there anywhere (preferably online and for free but on paper/offline/not free would also be acceptable) a complete list of Sierpiński's publications? Some of his papers are in the Polish Virtual Library but it is not a list and it does not tell me whether they have all his publications or only papers he published in Fundamenta Mathematicae. It does also not tell me whether he ever published any book, either.

Thanks in advance for pointers.

Rudy the Reindeer
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On pages 15-62 of Sierpiński's Oeuvres Choisies, Tome I (large pdf), [1974, Hartman and Schinzel, eds.] there is a list of 720 mathematical publications that appeared 1906-1966, more than 100 other articles on history and mathematical vulgarization, 50 books and brochures and 12 polycopied course notes.

His most famous books probably are Hypothèse du Continu (1934, book [10]) and Elementary Theory of Numbers (1964, book [39]).

Addition: The list in the Oeuvres Choisies is intended to be complete: quoting the avant-propos on page 7.

La liste complète des travaux scientifiques de Sierpiński en comporte 720. Les travaux choisis pour être publiés se distinguent soit par leur actualité, soit par leur importance pour le développement des mathématiques, soit encore par la beauté intrinsèque des résultats obtenus et des méthodes employées.

Wikipedia claims without source that there are 724 mathematical publications by Sierpiński.

In general, reasonably complete lists of publications and biographical information can often be found in collected works, e.g. Serre. This only works for the more famous mathematicians. Sometimes obituaries contain a short commentary on selected works and lists of publication.

For more modern authors (who only published after 1940) you can get a first overview by searching MathSciNet or the Zentralblatt, provided that you have access. Most scientific libraries have a subscription to these services. Searching for the Author's name with Author/Related in MathSciNet also gives results on articles about the author.

Martin
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  • Excellent, thank you. – Rudy the Reindeer Mar 11 '13 at 17:04
  • For the future: may I ask how you found it? – Rudy the Reindeer Mar 11 '13 at 20:25
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    I was editing my answer with some hints on how to find this information and where to look, so: see edit :-) – Martin Mar 11 '13 at 20:27
  • I'm sorry to bother you but do you know how one can access "Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Phil.-math. 1922, 253–257"? I tried Daivd's suggestion but then I can't seem to view the full article here on Jahrbuch Database. – Rudy the Reindeer May 26 '13 at 15:33
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    @MattN. You can access it on archive.org, here's the direct link to the article and here's the full record. – Martin May 26 '13 at 15:34
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    I first tried digizeitschriften.de, but the results were not too helpful. The second bet war archive.org, and it worked. – Martin May 26 '13 at 15:40
  • You are awesome and a lifesaver! Thank you so much. (I had ended up here by googling but failed to make sense of it.) – Rudy the Reindeer May 26 '13 at 15:42
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    @MattN. You're welcome :-) You were quite close. What you found is raw OCR text of the .djvu file of the 1919 edition of the same journal. You can get to the full record by clicking on the "See other formats" button. Changing 1919 to 1922 in the url would have led you to the article in a few more clicks. – Martin May 26 '13 at 15:51
  • Yeah, I didn't see the sneaky "See other formats" button. The site looked like a scam site to me and then my "filter" set in. – Rudy the Reindeer May 26 '13 at 21:04
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    @MattN. Very healthy reaction. If you don't know archive.org, the page you found looks very fishy indeed :-) // I found this question with a few links to good places where you can find stuff. // Thanks a lot for setting this bounty, I appreciate it! – Martin May 27 '13 at 03:38
  • You're very welcome. But don't be so grateful -- it's 10 points for every hour you saved me. Plus I'm still overjoyed about having obtained a digital copy of the 3 volumes of œuvres choisies which I meanwhile have snipped in the middle so that it's now ready to be made into a fully-functional paper copy. : ) – Rudy the Reindeer May 27 '13 at 12:23
  • I'm sorry to bother you once more. Now I'm trying to find Comptes Rendus des Séances de la Société des Sciences et des Lettres de Varsovie, Classe III, vol. 31 (1938), 27-32. I have looked on archive.org, digizeitschriften.de, googled and just to be sure searched the Polish Virtual Library but it's not there. Then I downloaded the two volumes of comptes rendus (1938) from gallica.fr and searched each for "mostowski" but got zero hits both times. (The article is by Mostowski and Lindenbaum and entitled "Über die Unabhängigkeit des Auswahlaxioms und einiger seiner Folgerungen"). – Rudy the Reindeer May 27 '13 at 19:21
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    Thanks again; it's not so much about the points :-) I couldn't find the original paper online, but there's an English translation in Mostowski's Foundational Studies: Selected Works, Part 2, p. 70. – Martin May 27 '13 at 21:56
  • Thank you very much! I can't access the entire article but I could access enough to confirm what I wanted. // Do you think if someone made a little web interface (e.g. on appengine) where people could upload scans of originals, would anyone collaborate? A crowd-sourced effort to make available online all papers in one place. With a search that actually shows up in Google searches. Would make life much easier. – Rudy the Reindeer May 28 '13 at 07:44
  • @MattN. Yes, such a thing would be wonderful and would make life a lot easier. I suppose quite a few people would be ready to contribute. However, there is the usual obstacle of copyright issues :-/ Ignoring the legal subtleties (which can probably be handled if one is serious about it), this would force the available papers to be on the rather old side. I fear that the absence of modern articles would narrow down the interested crowd in a dangerous way. – Martin May 29 '13 at 06:44
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    @MattN. In case you missed it: Ingrid Daubechies' (President of the International Mathematical Union) wrote a guest post Planning for the World Digital Mathematical Library on Terry Tao's blog. – Martin Jun 02 '13 at 11:44
  • I did miss it, thank you for the link. Sadly, it very much sounds like it's not going to happen within the next 5 years. But It's good to know that someone else is doing it. – Rudy the Reindeer Jun 02 '13 at 13:41
  • Do you think one could circumvent the "copyright infringement" problem by somehow making the content of the papers available? I mean something like texing a purchased scan and slightly changing the wording of the paper. A joint effort of mathematicians around the world doing this seems more likely to happen than the unicorn they are talking about in the article. – Rudy the Reindeer Jul 10 '13 at 15:55