It seems, based on some of his writings, that Stanislaw Lem had some background in non-basic mathematics. For example the poem "Love and Tensor Algebra" from The Cyberiad.
As far as I know, he never formally studied mathematics, so I'm wondering — is it known how or when he became interested in mathematics, and how he learned it?
His entry in the Polish Wikipedia says he read Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by N. Wiener and A Mathematical Theory of Communication by C. E. Shannon when he was an assistant at the Jagiellonian University (1948-50).
Cited source is a book Świat na krawędzi, a series of interviews with Lem, written by Tomasz Fiałkowski (p. 56-57 specifically).
