Leopold Klug died 70 years ago

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Published on 2015. március 24. kedd, 18:00

Founder of the predecessor of our Department lived 91 years.

We highlight only an interesting moment of the productive life of Leopold Klug (January 23., 1854 – March 24., 1945) based on an interview given by Edward Teller in 1961.

When I was ten years old, my father, who had really no understanding of how and why I would be interested, did see that I was. And he had an older friend who was a retired mathematics professor. His name was Leopold Klug. And he is probably the man who had the greatest influence on my life. I did not see him often, half a dozen times, a dozen times. He was a retired mathematics professor, and he did two things. One is, he got me a book. The title was "Algebra", the author was (Leonhard) Euler. ... Klug gave me that book, and I read it. It was my favorite book.

He had a favorite subject, and that was projective geometry. Projective plane geometry. What happens if you take a drawing in a plane, and project it on another plane. What are the properties that remain unchanged? For instance, a line will remain a line. A triangle will remain a triangle. But an equilateral triangle will not remain an equilateral triangle. A circle may become a hyperbola. What is the similarity between these curves? What remains unchanged? I was ten years old, and the problems that came up were too difficult for me to solve, but not too difficult to understand.

And there was a human element in it which impressed me. I found that the grown-ups had a terrible time, everybody got tired of what he was doing. Klug was the first grown-up whom I met who loved what he was doing, who did not get tired, and who even enjoyed explaining things to me. That I think is when I made up my mind, very firmly, that I wanted to do something that I really did want to do. Not for anyone else's sake, not for what it may lead to, but because in my inherent interest in the subject.

Source: Edward Teller Interview