About

Jerzy Weyman was born in Toruń, Poland, on 29th of April 1955. His family tree has a long and rich history; it also includes several figures who could be familiar to Polish history and literature enthusiasts. His maternal great-great-grandfather, Count Aleksander Fredro, was a poet, playwright, and author active during Polish Romanticism. Also, his great-grandfather, Piotr Szembek, was a military general in the 19th century. His father’s family, on the other hand, immigrated in the 19th century to Poland from Alsace, where Weyman is a fairly common surname. Both of his parents were doctors.

He attended IV LO High School in Toruń and, as far as he can remember, Jerzy was interested in mathematics since the 4th grade, inspired by the teacher he had that year. When he entered the Faculty of Mathematics at Nicolaus Copernicus University of Toruń in 1973, he became truly passionate about algebra from the very first year, partly thanks to the courses taught by his math mentor, Tadeusz Józefiak.

In 1977 Jerzy successfully defended his master’s thesis, which focused on Ideals Generated by Monomials. He took a position of Assistant Professor at the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Shortly after, he was accepted to the graduate school at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, USA, where Jerzy had the pleasure of studying with David Buchsbaum and David Eisenbud. He finished his PhD in 1980, focusing on Free Resolutions of Determinantal Ideals. The results of his thesis were published in joint papers with Kaan Akin and David Buchsbaum. In the early 1980s he came back to Poland to continue his previous position of Assistant Professor at the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. During that time, Jerzy was actively developing his analytical skills by working on Commutative Algebra Problems together with Tadeusz Józefiak and Piotr Pragacz.

In 1985 Jerzy immigrated to the United States permanently to take a position of Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. In 1990 he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor and he finally rose to the rank of full professor in 1995. During his stay at Northeastern University, Jerzy had an opportunity to cooperate and publish with many renowned mathematicians, including Harm Derksen, Kiyoshi Igusa, Marc Levine, Joseph Landsberg, Gordana Todorov, and Andrei Zelevinsky. In 2003 he published his first book entitled „Cohomology of Vector Bundles and Syzygies” by courtesy of Cambridge University Press. Four years later, in 2007, he had the pleasure of teaching in an INDAM Course in Algebra at the Tor Vergata University of Rome. In 2012 Jerzy was honored with the Humboldt-Forschungspreis Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of his lifetime achievements, which resulted in several visits to the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

In 2013 Jerzy moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut to take a position of Stuart and Joan Sidney Professor of Mathematics at the University of Connecticut. The same year in spring, he contributed to the Commutative Algebra Special Year at MSRI (Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Oakland, California) as the Simons Research Professor. Also in 2013, Jerzy obtained the title of Professor in Poland, his country of origin. In 2015 he was awarded the Wacław Sierpiński Medal and Lecture, granted by the University of Warsaw and the Polish Mathematical Society. The subject of his lecture was „Application of Algebra to Complexity Theory.” In 2017 he published his second book (co-authored with Harm Derksen) called „Introduction to Quiver Representations” by courtesy of the American Mathematical Society Publishing House.

In 2019, after spending 34 years of his life in the United States, Jerzy decided to move back to Poland and join Jagiellonian University in Cracow as Professor of Mathematics. In 2021 he had the pleasure of receiving the Stefan Banach Prize of the Polish Mathematical Society for outstanding achievements in mathematical sciences. In 2025, Jerzy delivered the XXXII Władysław Orlicz Memorial Lecture on the topic "ADE Diagrams in Classification Problems," during which he was honored with the Władysław Orlicz Medal. In the same year, he was also elected a Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and appointed Head of Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory Department at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. As of today, Jerzy continues to work there, leading several research projects.