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A note of welcome
Author(s) -
Turán Paul
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
journal of graph theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.164
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1097-0118
pISSN - 0364-9024
DOI - 10.1002/jgt.3190010105
Subject(s) - citation , computer science , graph , combinatorics , information retrieval , library science , mathematics
A note of welcome to the new Journal of Graph Theory might contain all sorts of good wishes and superficial praises of the beauty and usefulness of graph theory in general terms. My views on the latter, supported by facts, were given in [2]. As to the former, I can illustrate it better by giving some indications of the enchantment and help it gave me in the most difficult times of my life during the war. It sounds a bit incredible but it is true. The story goes back to 1940 when I received a letter from Shanghai from my friend George Szekeres in which he described an unsuccessful attempt to prove a famous Burnside conjecture (which was disproved later). The failure of his attempt could be effected by a special case of Ramsey’s theorem (but Ramsey’s paper, beyond mere existence, was unknown at that time in Hungary). At that time my main financial income came from private tutoring, and I had to teach the pupils at their homes. After receiving the letter, and while traveling between two consecutive pupils, I was pondering on its content. The chain of thought soon led me to finite forms and then to the following extremal problem: What is the maximum number of edges in a graph with n vertices not containing a complete subgraph with k vertices? Though I found the problem definitely interesting, I postponed it, having been interested at that time mainly in problems in analytical number theory. In September 1940 I was called in for the first time to labor-camp service. We were taken to Transylvania to work at railway building. Our main work was carrying railway ties. It was not very difficult work but a spectator could of course easily recognize that most of us-I was no exception-did it rather awkwardly. One of my more expert comrades said this at one occasion quite explicitly, even mentioning my name. An officer was standing nearby, watching our work. When hearing my name, he asked the comrade whether or not I was a mathematician. It turned out that the officer-Joseph Winkler by namewas an engineer. In his youth he had placed at a mathematical competition; in civilian life he was a proofreader at the printing shop where the periodical of the Third Class of the Academy (Mathematical and Natural Sciences) was printed and