mathematics

Stefánia Szilárd

Stefánia Szilárd is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Stefánia Szilárd rather than just read about it. In short: Stefánia Szilárd was a Hungarian-Soviet mathematician. She and her husband, Ervin Bauer, emigrated to the USSR in 1925 and were killed during the Great Purge a decade later.

Key takeaways

Stefánia Szilárd belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Stefánia Szilárd to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Stefánia Szilárd from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Stefánia Szilárd was a Hungarian-Soviet mathematician. She and her husband, Ervin Bauer, emigrated to the USSR in 1925 and were killed during the Great Purge a decade later. Karl Szilárd, also a mathematician, was her younger brother (the two had no relation to Leo Szilard). Szilárd was born in 1898 in Győr (then Austria-Hungary). She graduated from the Budapest University's Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in 1919, the same year marrying Ervin Bauer, a noted physician and biologist, and a staunch supporter of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. After the fall of the Republic in 1919, and the ensuing White Terror, the couple fled the country and lived, under hardship conditions, in Göttingen, Prague, and Berlin. After an invitation to Ervin Bauer by Nikolai Semashko, the Russian Commissar of Public Health of that time, they settled in 1925 in Moscow, moving to Leningrad in 1933. Stefánia's younger brother, Karl Szilárd, followed in 1934. In Moscow the Bauers socialized with other Hungarian emigres, including Máté Zalka, Béla Illés, and Antal Hidas. Stefánia became a member of the communist party, and worked, together with her husband, at the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Experimental Medicine. According to her contemporaries, she was an able mathematician, but her life apparently was dominated by the life and deeds of her husband, whom she helped in his work in theoretical biology. During her life, she published only two short papers – one in Hungarian in 1917 on number theory, and another one in 1934 (written in German and published in Matematicheskii Sbornik) on complex analysis. The couple was arrested in August 1937 and shot in January 1938. They are buried in Levashovo Memorial Cemetery. They were both rehabilitated in 1956.

Family Ervin and Stefánia had three children: Mikhail (born in 1924), Sophia (born in 1928, died of pneumonia at the age of four), and Karl (born in 1934). After their deaths, their two surviving children were separated, given different family names, and sent to orphanages. As an adult Mikhail Bauer served in a labor army and was sent to Barnaul to work in an engineering plant before returning to Leningrad in 1956. He published a memoir in 2003.

References

As of this edit, this article uses content from "Mathematicians Going East", authored by Pasha Zusmanovich, which is licensed in a way that permits reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, but not under the GFDL. All relevant terms must be followed.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Stefánia Szilárd

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Stefánia Szilárd claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Stefánia Szilárd before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Stefánia Szilárd ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Stefánia Szilárd

In research: Stefánia Szilárd appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Stefánia Szilárd in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Stefánia Szilárd is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Budapest University alumni, European mathematician stubs, Great Purge victims from Hungary, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Stefánia Szilárd outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Stefánia Szilárd in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Stefánia Szilárd means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Stefánia Szilárd out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Stefánia Szilárd in simple terms?

Stefánia Szilárd was a Hungarian-Soviet mathematician. She and her husband, Ervin Bauer, emigrated to the USSR in 1925 and were killed during the Great Purge a decade later.

Why does Stefánia Szilárd matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Stefánia Szilárd?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Stefánia Szilárd.