Ryszard Zieliński (1 July1932 - 30 April 2012) Ryszard Zielinski was born on 1 July 1932 in Warsaw, where he lived till the fall of the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944. After the Uprising the whole family was relocated from Warsaw to the German transit camp in Prushkov, near Warsaw. After his mother passed away he moved to the nearby city of Piastow. In 1950 he enrolled in the Main School of Planning and Statistics (SGPIS, currently The Warsaw School of Economics), and in 1953 he obtained his bachelor’s degree in Statistical Quality Control. In 1955 he was awarded a Master’s degree for a thesis “Power of control chart for individual observations” prepared under the supervision of Prof. Wieslaw Sadowski. Immediately after graduation he was ordered to work in POLAM (Rosa Luxemburg Lamp Manufacturing Facility) in Warsaw. He was appointed as an engineer in the department of Quality Control and later as a specialist in Quality Control. Ryszard continued to develop his research interests towards his PhD degree that was awarded by SGPiS in 1961. His PhD project on the “Operation of a railway interchange: economical and organisational problems” was developed under the supervision of Prof. Wieslaw Sadowski. During his PhD project, he also enrolled in a second degree at the Department Mathematics and Physics at the Warsaw University and completed his Master degree with the thesis “Applications of mathematical statistics to estimate carbon content in steel”, again under the supervision of Prof. Wieslaw Sadowski. On 30 June 1959 he resigned from his position at POLAM. On his departure Ryszard received an opinion of “an accurate, conscientious and disciplined employee, extremely creative and with administrative talents”. On 1 July 1959 he joined the Facility for Experimental Production of Computers where he stayed until 30 October 1963. “He was a leader of the team working on applications of Mathematics to solving problems in Engineering and Economics including the development of numerical algorithms implemented on the computer ZAM-2. Wide knowledge of methods of Applied Mathematics and a thorough understanding of diverse physical situations was required in order to build mathematical models for a large variety of problems. “ (a quotation from a written assessment Ryszard received on 2 September 1963 from Krzysztof Moszynski, Head of the Office of Programming and Applications of Computers, now Professor of Mathematics. From 2 November 1963 until 30 September 1965 Ryszard was employed at the Air Force Technical Institute, where he initiated and convened a seminar “Monte-Carlo methods and mathematical modelling”. While working at the Facility for Experimental Production of Computers and at the Air Force Technical Institute, Richard maintained a part time appointment at IMPAN, the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (since 1 March 1960). It was to be his life-long association with IMPAN. On 1 October 1965 his appointment was converted to full time. In 1976 Richard was awarded the highest academic degree (equivalent to a D.Sc.) at IMPAN on the basis of a dissertation “ Global stochastic approximation”. Twelve years later, in 1988 he was promoted to a Professor of Mathematical Science and finally, in 1997 he was offered a post of a Professorial Chair at IMPAN.
