Among the recipients of the award there is professor Marcin Kamiński, a researcher at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Environmental Engineering at Lodz University of Technology and Chair of the Discipline Council for Civil Engineering, Geodesy and Transport. The award was to recognize his contribution to science in the year 2021, i.e. a series of publications in international research journals, conference proceedings, and chapters in monographs. Two most significant papers were published in The International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering and in the journal Composite Structures. It bears repeating that professor Kamiński is in the narrow circle of the top 2 percent of the most frequently cited scholars in the world.
Born 54 years ago in Toruń, professor Marcin Kamiński graduated from Lodz University of Technology in 1994. At present, he holds an appointment at the Department of Structural Mechanics. The award winner's primary research interests concentrate on stochastic mechanics, in particular on numerical methods, including the Stochastic Finite Element Method, as well as the application of probabilistic entropy to structural reliability analysis. Professor Kaminski is quoted stating of his work, 'The award-winning research is multidisciplinary - it concerns and is relevant to many different fields of engineering sciences - from construction through mechanics and materials engineering to computer science and applied mathematics. Research on probabilistic entropy as a measure of heterogeneity and disorder is currently being conducted with the OPUS grant from the National Science Centre 2022-2025. For several years, implementation work in this field has been performed in collaboration with Commercecon, Łódź, and has so far been focused on the reliability analysis of steel structures that exhibit statistical imperfections’.
ŻU asked professor Marcin Kamiński for his personal impression of attending the Polish Science Gala in Toruń. While commenting on the event, the laureate referred to Nicolaus Copernicus, to the years he had spent in Toruń, and to the people closest to him - his parents and his wife.
The World Copernican Congress is certainly a great scientific and historical event, bringing together well-known members of the world of academia, science, politics, as well as ordinary people following the academic life of Toruń, the history of Nicolaus Copernicus, and fans of astronomy. Unlike many international conferences organized in Poland, the event was attended by a few Nobel Prize winners who came to deliver interesting lectures. You can follow the proceedings, commentary, and interviews online. Both the City of Toruń and Nicolaus Copernicus University have put a great deal of time and effort into the preparation to this event, and they should be thanked for it. As the Minister remarked during his address, the World Congress and the newly established Copernicus Academy were both initiated by the authorities of the Republic of Poland as a living memorial to the scholarly patron of the City of Toruń.
The world revolves around Copernicus
Since so much is being said about the man whose life and work we pay tribute to during the Year of Copernicus, I find it quite challenging to add anything original. What comes to mind however is the statue of Copernicus considered by many to be quite unusual due to the fact that it shows him in a standing position. Yet rarely does anyone notice that this is the only figure to depict the astronomer sporting a moustache. Nor do many people know that whenever Torunians have a hard time deciding where to meet, they usually end up ‘by the by the statue’ as it is the landmark in the city, even though the City Hall is right behind the atronomer’s back. The monument was erected in Toruń's Old Town Market Square in 1853, although Stanisław Staszic had much earlier started campaigning to have it placed there.
At the Church of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, close to the Old Town Market Square in Toruń, there is also the Gothic baptismal font where the future astronomer was baptized, as well as his epitaph by Albert Dűrer and a carved bust from 1766. And as for the Copernicus House located at Kopernika 15/17 and much liked by tourists, reported among the past visitors is none other but Napoleon himself.
The turbulent fate of the original De Revolutionibus, Copernicus' original six-volume work written in Latin and Greek and published in Nuremberg in 1543, which after the Second World War finally found its due place in the Jagiellonian University Library in Kraków, is rarely discussed. During my many foreign trips, I managed to visit probably all the academic centers where Copernicus used to work. But my most surprising discovery was when I found his name on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, engraved next to Newton's name on the wall of one of the wings of the MIT’s oldest building. Somewhat coincidentally, the building on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Memorial Drive is home to the MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
A place close to my heart
Receiving the award during the Copernicus Congress had a special meaning to me who was born in Toruń. I do not expect anything like that to happen again. Back in the days when I attended the Tadeusz Kościuszko 4th Secondary School in Toruń, which to this day stands in Warszawska Street, not far from the Congress Centre, never once did it occur to me to me, who much preferred to pursue a civil engineering degree program at Lodz University of Technology to any other program that UMK could offer, that one of the most important awards in my life would be presented to me at a venue located just a few streets down from the school.
Certainly, my joy was shared by my parents, who for many years had strong ties with the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry at UMK.
A sense of accomplishment and a feeling of joy
I was not quite certain whether I would be granted the award – the names of the awardees are only announced during the award ceremony. The fact that mine is an award for individual achievement and since no other Lodz University of Technology researchers were among the award winners, the recognition is all the more important to me and to Lodz University of Technology, which presents a great opportunity to extend the word of appreciation to His Magnificence the Rector of Lodz University of Technology, and to the Senators of the University who unanimously supported my nomination for the award.
The award is granted for research completed and published in a given calendar year. For me, this was the year 2021, which was not at all the most productive year in my career to date.
The award, which has also been accentuated by the Minister, is also a recognition of the research group one works with. Therefore I wish to take this opportunity to say it would have been difficult for me to have achieved all of this without my past and present doctoral students.
It starts at home
At all the galas, university celebrations rarely or never does one hear anyone say that any achievement by any scientist is to a very large extent ensured by those who are closest to them. Although the invitation to the Polish Science Gala was an individual one, upon my request it was also extended to my wife Ola, thanks to whom I have been able to concentrate a little on my research rather than on the domestic front.
Pondering the future of Polish science, one would be right to posit that the situation calls for amelioration, as it is not at all uncommon for great scholarly accomplishment to be achieved by those whose interest in science has been nurtured at home.