Esther Szekeres
Hungarian-Australian mathematician
Esther Szekeres (Hungarian: Klein Eszter; née Klein; 20 February 1910 – 28 August 2005) was a Hungarian–Australian mathematician.
Early life and education
Esther Klein was born to Ignaz Klein in a Jewish family in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, on 20 February 1910. As a young physics student in Budapest, Klein was a member of a group of Hungarians including Paul Erdős, George Szekeres, Pál Turán, and her old schoolfriend Márta Svéd (then Wachsberger), who convened over interesting mathematical problems, often at the Anonymous in Budapest City Park. Klein was known as Epsz by Svéd.
In 1933, Klein proposed to the group a combinatorial problem that Erdős named as the "Happy Ending problem", as it led to her marriage to George Szekeres. Erdős and George Szekeres went on to publish about the problem, but Esther was not mentioned as taking part later.
Career
Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Esther and George Szekeres emigrated to Australia after spending the wartime years in Hongkew, a community of refugees located in Shanghai, China, before moving to Australia in 1945. They first lived in Adelaide, South Australia, for three years where they shared a small apartment with Márta and her husband George Svéd, with all of their children, before moving to Sydney in 1964.
In Sydney, Esther lectured at Macquarie University and was actively involved in mathematics enrichment for high-school students. In 1984, she jointly founded a weekly mathematics enrichment meeting that has since expanded into a programme of about 30 groups that continue to meet weekly and inspire high school students throughout Australia and New Zealand.
The public source identifies “Esther Szekeres” as hungarian-Australian mathematician. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Esther, Szekeres and Hungarian-Australian.
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This entry incorporates text from “Esther Szekeres” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.