Márta Svéd

Márta Svéd (née Wachsberger; 16 December 1910 – 30 September 2005) was a Hungarian mathematician who was a teacher of mathematics at the University of Adelaide after moving to Australia in the 1930s. She was 75 years old when she completed her PhD in 1985. She wrote the textbook Journey into Geometries, and won the BH Neumann Award in 1994 for her contributions to mathematics learning in Australia.

Early life and education Márta Wachsberger was born in Hungary on 16 December 1910 of Jewish parents. who moved from Sydney to Melbourne in around 2002. Her fiction has been published in literary journals such as Meanjin and Overland, and she has published two novels, Game Day (about Aussie rules football), and the historical novel A Universe of Sufficient Size. The latter, which was shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award, is a story about a group of Jewish mathematicians in Hungary who flee the country, which she based on stories she had heard from Márta Svéd. While the story is fictional, several characters are loosely based on people in Márta Svéd's circle, in particular her mother's best friend from school, Esther Szekeres (née Klein) and her husband George Szekeres, and the famous mathematician Paul Erdős. Erich Mayer, writing in ArtsHub, gave the book 5 out of 5 stars.