Esther Szekeres

Esther Szekeres, born Esther Klein (Klein Eszter in Hungarian) in Budapest on 20 February 1910 and died in Adelaide on 28 August 2005, was a Hungarian-Australian mathematician. As a young physics student she belonged to a Budapest circle that included Paul Erdos, George Szekeres, Pal Turan and her schoolfriend Marta Sved, who met to argue over mathematical problems. In 1933 she posed a combinatorial question to the group that Erdos named the Happy Ending problem, because it led to her marriage to George Szekeres in 1937. After the war years in the Hongkew refugee community in Shanghai, the couple settled in Australia in 1945, first in Adelaide and from 1964 in Sydney, where she lectured at Macquarie University. In 1984 she co-founded a weekly mathematics enrichment meeting that grew into some thirty groups for high-school students across Australia and New Zealand. Macquarie gave her an honorary doctorate in 1990 and she received a B. H. Neumann Award in 1993. She and her husband died within an hour of each other.