George Szekeres 1911–2005

Abstract

George Szekeres was a distinguished Hungarian-Australian mathematician, who worked in many different areas of mathematics, and with many collaborators. He was born in Budapest in 1911. His youth between the two World Wars was spent in Hungary, a country that, as a result of historical events, went through a golden age and produced a great number of exceptional intellects; his early mathematical explorations were in the company of several of these. However, for family reasons, he trained as a chemist rather than a mathematician. From 1938 to 1948, he lived in Shanghai, China, another remarkable city, where he experienced the horrors of persecution and war but nevertheless managed to prove some notable mathematical results. In 1948, he moved to Australia, as a lecturer, then senior lecturer, and finally reader, at the University of Adelaide, and then in 1964 he took up the Foundation Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of New South Wales; in Australia he was able to bring his mathematical talents to fruition. After many years in Sydney, he returned to Adelaide, where he died in 2005. We discuss his early life in Hungary, his sojourn in Shanghai, and his mature period in Australia. We also discuss some aspects of his mathematical work, which is extraordinarily broad.