George Szekeres

Szekeres György was born in Budapest, Hungary, on 29 May 1911. He received his degree in chemistry at the Royal Joseph University (later Technical University of Budapest). Subsequently, George and Paul wrote a paper (1935) that generalises this result; it is regarded as one of the foundational works in the field of combinatorial geometry. Erdős dubbed the original problem the "Happy Ending" problem because it resulted in the marriage of George and Esther. ==Career==

Szekeres worked for six years in Budapest as an analytical chemist, and during this time married Esther Klein in 1937. Being Jewish, the family had to escape from the Nazi persecution so Szekeres took a job as a leather chemist in Shanghai, China. There they lived through World War II, the Japanese occupation and the beginnings of the Communist revolution. and the family (with their son, born in China), moving to Adelaide, South Australia, in June 1948. Esther also taught at the university. In 1964, the family moved to Sydney, where Szekeres took a position as professor of mathematics at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and taught there until his retirement in 1976, when he became emeritus professor. He continued to publish papers after his retirement. In 1978 he published a joint paper with Erdős entitled "Some number theoretic problems on binomial coefficients". His 1985 paper "Distribution of labelled trees by diameter" analysed the graphs described by the title and, among many other results, found the expected value of the diameter of a random labelled tree on nn vertices. Also in 1985 he showed his continuing interest in using computers in mathematical investigations with "Computer examination of the two-dimensional simultaneous approximation constant". He worked closely with many prominent mathematicians throughout his life, including Erdős, his wife Esther, Pál Turán, Béla Bollobás, Ronald Graham, Alf van der Poorten, Miklós Laczkovich, and John Coates. He worked on many problems and published many papers, especially in the field of combinatorics, graph theory in particular. Many mathematical concepts bear his name, including Szekeres snark, Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates, Szekeres–Wilf number, and the Erdős–Szekeres theorem. ==Other activities==

Szekeres was a founder member of the Australian Mathematical Society in August 1956, and served as its president from 1972 to 1974. He devised problems for secondary school mathematical olympiads run by UNSW, and for a yearly undergraduate competition run by the Sydney University Mathematics Society. ==Recognition and honours==

• ?: Elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences • 2001: Establishment of the George Szekeres Medal by the Australian Mathematical Society • 2002: Member of the Order of Australia (AM), "for service to mathematics and science, particularly as a contributor to education and research, to the support and development of the University of New South Wales Mathematics Competition and the Australian Mathematical Olympiad Team" ==Personal life==

Szkeres married Esther Klein on 13 June 1937. After moving to Sydney, they bought a house in Turramurra, which they had obtained at a cheap price owing to it having belonged to a person who had died in suspicious circumstances. In fiction The Svéds' granddaughter, author Miriam Sved, wrote the historical novel A Universe of Sufficient Size, published in 2019. It tells the story of a group of Jewish mathematicians in Hungary who flee the country, which she based on stories she had heard from Márta Svéd. While the story is fictional, several characters are loosely based on people in Svéd's circle, in particular Esther and George Szekeres, as well as Paul Erdős. ==Footnotes==