The Shkotska coffee house was famous not only for its aromatic coffee but also for the huge number of regular visitors.
Most notable among them was a group of older men who came in every evening, ordered coffee, and then argued for a long time about something. They would leave the results of their discussions as pencil inscriptions on the marble tables. Those men were university math professors, and the inscriptions were formulas.
The next morning, students would come to the coffee shop and copy them for themselves. Sometimes the employees of the café would accidentally erase the inscriptions when they were cleaning the tables. This went on until the wife of Lviv professor Stefan Banach, Lucia, bought a notebook for writing, kept it with the bartender, and the bartender gave it to any mathematician who showed interest in writing down formulas. It was here that Stefan Banach made his important scientific discoveries. And the amount of coffee he could drink was legendary.
That notebook was called the “Shkotska Book” – the basis of mathematical analysis and cybernetics; it survived the Second World War and is now privately owned in Germany.
It is said that it was here that the Lviv School of Mathematics was born over a cup of coffee.