Mark Kac’s First Publication: A Translation of "O nowym sposobie rozwiązywania równań stopnia trzeciego" – Obtaining a Copy of the Original Article

A clue to the whereabouts of the article appears in a book by Daniel Kalman [2009, 79–82], which presents Kac’s solution. Clearly, the author had seen the original article, or something very close to it. In email he told me that his discussion had been based on an unpublished paper [Roy n.d.] by Ranjan Roy of Beloit College in Wisconsin. Correspondence with Prof. Roy confirmed that he had once had a copy of the Kac article, but that he could not find either it or even his own paper cited by Prof. Kalman! He added that he had obtained a scan of the original article from Prof. Joel E. Cohen of Rockefeller University, one of the world’s experts on population biology and a close friend of Kac’s. The reminiscences that became Kac’s autobiography [Kac 1985] were largely drawn from stories he told Prof. Cohen, tape recorder in hand, as they walked together through the halls at Rockefeller.

Prof. Cohen very kindly responded to email, though the pandemic had largely shut down normal life and he was not in New York City. A week or two later, he braved the virus to return to his office, and sent a scan, drawing attention to two small penciled remarks to ensure they were not overlooked. On the magazine’s title page, Kac had written, “See how bright I was when I was 15–16! M K”. And at the start of his article, there is an addendum, “\(m\neq n\)!”.

Figure 2. The pages of Kac’s article, from the scan by Cohen.