All programmers worldwide associate Polish notation to Jan Łukasiewicz who invented it in 1920. And while the French claim Marie Curie as one of their own, for Poland she remains Maria Skłodowska-Curie. Or just Maria Skłodowska – the first woman to win a Nobel prize in 1911.

Nonetheless Polish people will usually prefer to remember that without the breaking of the Enigma cypher by Polish mathematicians the history of Europe could turn out differently.

This may explain the aura that scientists, mathematicians and software programmers bask in today and how international coding contests simply reflect this excellence.

Take the TopCoder Final in Orlando for example, which placed more than 2000 top-notch sofware engineers in competition. Fifteen Poles among the top 100 (and just second after China) means a 38 million Poland has more top level software developers than India, Russia or the US.

Poznan's Technical University won the first prize in the Hack4Europe contest - organised by the European Foundation, and arrived in fact second in the Samsung Developer Challenge. In 2010 Poles took the second, fourth and fifth places of the High School Programming League.