The brilliant Polish mathematician Stefan Banach (1892-1945) was an original man, who was decidedly too constrained by conventions and social obligations.

 Ignoring the dictates of fashion, he only wore short-sleeved shirts and went to football matches, even though this sport was considered inelegant at the time.

He was a cheerful and witty guy, he liked to have fun and loved dancing to the point that, sometimes, he asked the orchestra to continue playing until the morning, paying the musicians out of his own pocket.

This fact is confirmed by one of his students, who recalls that the famous professor, sometimes, arrived at the lessons that began at 8 in the morning, dressed rather elegantly (in tailcoat), so much so that he looked like a young diplomat.

At first, the students thought that he was meeting a very important person at the end of the lessons, but later they realized that, in those circumstances, the professor was also a bit sloppy, disheveled and unshaven (once he even fell asleep on the desk).

The reason for this strange behavior soon became clear: the night before, he had gone out to have fun, he had danced all night until morning, and then ran straight to class.

The fame of Banach's genius reached overseas and pushed the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, to send the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann to Lviv three times, with a very specific purpose: to convince Banach to emigrate to the United States.