The Postcard
A postcard that was published by A. S. The card was posted in Esher using a ½d. stamp on Thursday the 18th. August 1910. It was sent to:
Harry Nash Esq.,
10 Park Road,
Bromley,
Kent.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"18/8/10.
Dear H,
Having a good time.
The weather is jolly.
Today we have been
to Oxshott Woods, &
yesterday we went to
Kingston.
Fred seems to be having
a fine time.
Yours,
David."
Florists' Transworld Delivery
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 18th. August 1910, Florists' Transworld Delivery, known at flower shops as FTD, was founded by fifteen flower shop owners in various cities.
They inaugurated the first system of "wiring flowers", whereby a person in one city could arrange with one florist for the delivery of flowers, long distance, by another florist. In 1965, international deliveries began.
Rickwood Field
Also on that day, Rickwood Field, the oldest professional baseball park in America, opened with 10,000 fans watching the minor league Birmingham Barons play a Southern League game.
The park also hosted the Negro league Birmingham Black Barons between 1923 and 1960, while the SL Barons played there until 1987.
The park continues to host one Barons' game each season, with the players wearing "throwback" uniforms.
Pál Turán
The 18th. August 1910 also marked the birth, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary of Pál Turán.
Pál Turán, also known as Paul Turán, was a Hungarian mathematician who worked primarily in extremal combinatorics.
Extremal combinatorics studies how large or how small a collection of finite objects (numbers, graphs, vectors, sets, etc.) can be, if it has to satisfy certain restrictions.
In 1940, because of his Jewish origins, Turán was arrested by the Nazis and sent to a labour camp in Transylvania, later being transferred several times to other camps.
While imprisoned, Turán came up with some of his best theories, which he was able to publish after the war.
-- Pál Turán - the Early Years
Turán was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest. Pál's outstanding mathematical abilities showed early, and as early as secondary school he was clearly the best student.
On the 1st. September 1930, at a mathematical seminar at the University of Budapest, Turan met Pál Erdős. They became well-known for answering questions in the journal KöMaL. They collaborated for 46 years, and produced 28 joint scientific papers.
Turán received a teaching degree at the University of Budapest in 1933. In the same year he published two major scientific papers in the journals of the American and London Mathematical Societies.
Pál was awarded a PhD degree in 1935 at Eötvös Loránd University.
As a Jew, he fell victim to numerous clausus (work restrictions), and could not get a stable job for several years. He made a living as a tutor, preparing applicants and students for exams.
It was not until 1938 that he obtained a job at a rabbinical training school in Budapest as a teacher's assistant, by which time he had already had 16 major scientific publications and an international reputation as one of Hungary's leading mathematicians.
Pál married Edit (Klein) Kóbor in 1939; they had one son, Róbert.
-- Pál Turán in World War II
In September 1940 Turán was interned in labour service. As he recalled later, his five years in labour camps eventually saved his life: they saved him from ending up in a concentration camp, where 550,000 of the 770,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during World War II.
In 1940 Turán ended up in Transylvania for railway construction. Turán said that one day while working another prisoner addressed him by his surname, saying that he was working extremely clumsily:
"An officer was standing nearby, watching us work.
When he heard my name, he asked the comrade
whether I was a mathematician. It turned out that
the officer, Joshef Winkler, was an engineer.
In his youth, won a prize in a mathematical
competition.
In civilian life Joshef was a proof-reader at the print
shop where the periodical of the Third Class of the
Academy (Mathematical and Natural sciences) was
printed.
There he had seen some of my manuscripts."
Winkler wanted to help Turán, and managed to get him transferred to an easier job. Turán was sent to the sawmill's warehouse, where he had to show the carriers the right-sized timbers.
During this period, Turán composed and was partly able to record a long paper on the Riemann zeta function.
Turán was subsequently transferred several times to other camps. As he later recalled, the only way to keep his sanity was through mathematics, solving problems in his head and thinking through problems.
In July 1944 Turán worked at a brick factory near Budapest. His and the other prisoners' task was to move the brick cars from the kilns to the warehouses on rails that crossed at several points with other tracks.
At these crossings the trolleys would "bounce" and some of the bricks would fall out, causing problems for the workers. This situation led Turan to consider how to achieve the minimum number of crossings for m kilns and n warehouses.
It was only after the war, in 1952, that he was able to work seriously on this problem. Turán's formulation of this problem is recognized as one of the first studies of the crossing numbers of graphs, and has developed into a field of mathematics in its own right.
Turán was liberated in 1944, after which he was able to return to work at the rabbinical school in Budapest.
-- Pál Turán After World War II
Turán became associate professor at the University of Budapest in 1945 and full professor in 1949.
In the early post-war years, the streets were patrolled by soldiers. On occasion, random people were seized and sent to penal camps in Siberia. One such patrol stopped Turan, who was on his way home from university.
The soldiers questioned the mathematician and then forced him to show them the contents of his briefcase. Seeing a reprint of an article from a pre-War Soviet magazine among the papers, the soldiers immediately let the mathematician go. The only thing Turán said about that day in his correspondence with Erdös was that:
"I have come across an extremely
interesting way of applying number
theory..."
In 1952 he married again, the second marriage was to Vera Sós, a mathematician. They had a son, György, in 1953. The couple published several papers together.
One of his students recalled that Turán was a very passionate and active man - in the summer he held maths seminars by the pool in between his swimming and rowing training.
In 1960 he celebrated his 50th. birthday and the birth of his third son, Tamás, by swimming across the Danube.
-- Final Years and Death of Pál Turán
Around 1970 Turán was diagnosed with leukaemia, but the diagnosis was revealed only to his wife Vera Sós, who decided not to tell him about his illness. In 1976 she told Erdős.
Vera was sure that Turán was ‘too much in love with life’ and would have fallen into despair at the news of his fatal illness, and would not have been able to work properly.
Erdős said that Turán did not lose his spirit even in the Nazi camps and did brilliant work there. Erdős regretted that Turán had been kept unaware of his illness, because he had put off certain works and books 'for later', hoping that he would soon feel better, and in the end was never able to finish them.
Turán died in Budapest, Hungary on the 26th. September 1976 of leukemia, aged 66.
-- The Legacy of Pál Turán
Pál Turán is known for:
-- Extremal graph theory
-- Turán graph
-- Turán number
-- Turán's brick factory problem
-- Turán sieve
-- Turán's inequalities
-- Turán's lemma
-- Turán's method
-- Turán's theorem
-- Turán–Kubilius inequality
-- Erdős–Turán conjecture
-- Erdős–Turán inequality
-- Erdős–Turán conjecture on additive bases
-- Erdős–Turán construction
-- Erdős–Turán–Koksma inequality
-- Kővári–Sós–Turán theorem
