Frigyes Riesz between the two World Wars

Abstract

Frigyes Riesz (22 January 1880 to 28 February 1956), was a Hungarian mathematician today best known for his work on functional analysis. His biography contains reference only to a few events of his life. The present paper intends to contribute to a critical revision of Riesz's biography focusing on three highly politicized moments of his life by using historical sources that have not been studied yet. The focus lies on the following moments: at the end of the First World War, Riesz described in a letter the tense situation in Koloszvár before the exile of the whole university. In the 1920s, he founded in Szeged a new mathematical journal and wrote to colleagues asking for support. During the Second World War, his Jewish ancestry determined the fate of his relatives and of himself, and caused his colleagues abroad to become worried about him.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Koloszvár is the Hungarian name of the town. Its name in German is Klausenburg, in Romanian Cluj-Napoca, and in English Clausenburg.

² See Thron 1997, 23; Császár 2005, 45, and Szőkefalvi-Nagy 1983, 70.

³ Romania re-entered the war on 10 November 1918 (Kiritzesco 1934, 436).

⁴ See Riesz 1919.

⁵ See Hardy and Riesz 1915: ‘Mathematicis quotquot ubique sunt operum societatem nunc diremptam mox ut optare licet redintegraturis D.D.D. auctores hostes idemque amici’, kindly translated into German by Peter Brodkorb, a latin teacher in a German gramar school. Horvath (1982) referred to Hardy's dedication, see page 84.

⁶ Horvath (1982) rightly called Hardy a pacifist, see page 101. Dauben (1980) wrote a very interesting article on Hardy as a pacifist.

⁷ The congress proceedings contains a list of visiting members and their Cambridge address (Hobson and Love 1913, 10–27).

⁸ As it happened with Riesz's later correspondence, see next section.

⁹ See the article The history of the Institute on the website of the Department of Mathematics at the University Szeged. It contains some interesting anecdotes involving measures taken by Riesz and Haar in order to get financial support for the library (Anonymous nd). There is an authorized version of this same article in Csákány et al. (2013). The authors are the same who wrote the chapter concerning the Department of Mathematics in the book Past and present of Szeged University 1921–1998 (Csákány and Varga 1999). See also Hersh and John-Steiner 1993.

¹⁰ Fréchet (1922) wrote: ‘Mais vous aviez surtout chance d’obtenir des exchange avec les journaux publie par des sociétés ou universités ou Écoles’.

¹¹ See Császár 1960, 1975, 148, 2005, 51.

¹² I thank Ilona Riesz, Frigyes’ grand niece and Marcell's granddaughter, for the hint. In summer 2008, I visited Győr and met her cousin in Budapest, Sándor's grandson, who gave me further valuable information.

¹³ Personal communication by Frigyes’ relatives in Budapest.

¹⁴ On the holocaust in Hungary see Arendt 1964, 301. On the fate of the Jews in Győr see Braham 2000, 142.

¹⁵ I thank Olga Spitzer, the synagogue's keys keeper, for telling me all this as well as for showing me the holocaust book and for allowing me to study the birth register book.

¹⁶ I found the article of Hersh and John-Steiner (1993) after I had met Frigyes’ relatives in Budapest. Since 2013, a few remarks concerning Riesz's Jewish ancestry appear also in the website of the Janos Bolyai Institute.

¹⁷ See Arendt 1964, 301ff. Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest on 9 July 1944 (Braham and Miller 1998, 139).

¹⁸ Frigyes’ relatives in Budapest conserve a newspaper clipping mentioning Frigyes as one of three world-renowned scholars in Szeged who had been forced to wear the yellow star. The clipping discusses the book Albert Szent-Györgyi in Szeged and the Szent-Györgyi Collection by Tibor Szabó and Andor Zallár which appeared in 1989.

¹⁹ Hersh and John-Steiner (1993) are the exception.

²⁰ These phrases are cited at the beginning of the present paper. They go back to Szőkefalvi-Nagy (1983) and Császár (2005).