Kazimierz Kuratowski was born in what is now Poland, but at the time was part of Russia. He attended the University of Glasgow in Scotland to study engineering, winning the class prize in mathematics at the end of his first year. He was unable to return to Glasgow for his second year, because of the outbreak of World War I. The University of Warsaw was re-founded in 1915, and Kuratowski enrolled to study mathematics. He received a doctorate degree from the university in 1921.
In 1927, Kuratowski was appointed professor of mathematics at the Technical University of Lvov. He made important contributions in set theory, measure theory, and graph theory, and worked with many of the leading mathematicians of the time, including Steinhaus, Banach, Ulam, and von Neumann. In particular, Kuratowski developed the modern definition of a function as a set of ordered pairs.
After World War II, Kuratowski served as president of the Polish Mathematical Society for eight years, and played a major role in the establishment of the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Kuratowski died on June 18, 1980 in Warsaw.