Esther Szekeres

Esther Szekeres (Hungarian: Klein Eszter; 20 February 1910 – 28 August 2005) was a Hungarian–Australian mathematician with an Erdős number of 1.^[1]

Biography

Esther Klein was born to Ignaz Klein in a Jewish family in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary in 1910. As a young woman in Budapest, Klein was a member of a group of Hungarians including Paul Erdős, George Szekeres and Pál Turán that convened over interesting mathematical problems.^[2]

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 in 1937, with whom she had two children.^[3]

Following the outbreak of World War II, Esther and George Szekeres emigrated to Australia after spending several years in Hongkew, a community of refugees located in Shanghai, China.^[4] In Australia, they originally settled in Adelaide before moving to Sydney in the 1960s.

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.^[5]

In 2004, she and George moved back to Adelaide, where, on 28 August 2005, she and her husband died within an hour of each other.^[2][3]

References