* 1939 – 1945, the Second Battle of the Atlantic.

Subsequent formalizations were framed as attempts to define " effective calculability " or " effective method "; those formalizations included the Gödel – Herbrand – Kleene recursive functions of 1930, 1934 and 1935, Alonzo Church's lambda calculus of 1936, Emil Post's " Formulation 1 " of 1936, and Alan Turing's Turing machines of 1936 – 7 and 1939.

* 1890 – Anthony Fokker, Dutch aviation engineer ( d. 1939 )

* 1939 – André Ouellet, French-Canadian politician

* 1852 – Ferdinand von Lindemann, German mathematician ( d. 1939 )

* 1939 – Alan Ayckbourn, English writer

* 1939 – Johnny Raper, Australian rugby league footballer

* 1939 – The 1939-40 New York World's Fair opens.

* 1939 – NBC inaugurates its regularly scheduled television service in New York City, broadcasting President Franklin D. Roosevelt's N. Y. World's Fair opening day ceremonial address.

* 1939 – First flight of the turbojet-powered Heinkel He 178, the world's first jet aircraft.

* 1939 – William Least Heat-Moon, American author

* 1939 – Edward Patten, American singer-songwriter and producer ( Gladys Knight & the Pips ) ( d. 2005 )

* 1939 – Bulle Ogier, French actress

* 1939 – Romano Prodi, Italian politician and statesman

* 1939 – Hércules Brito Ruas, Brazilian footballer

* 1939 – Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon.

* 1939 – Benjamin Barber, American theorist

* 1939 – Wes Craven, American director

* 1939 – John W. Snow, American politician, 73rd United States Secretary of the Treasury

* 1984 – Marvin Gaye, American singer ( The Moonglows ) ( b. 1939 )

* 2001 – Trinh Cong Son, Vietnamese composer ( b. 1939 )

Eastern European theorists include Pyotr Stolypin ( 1862 – 1911 ) and Alexander Chayanov ( 1888 – 1939 ) in Russia ; Adolph Wagner ( 1835 – 1917 ), and Karl Oldenberg in Germany, and Bolesław Limanowski ( 1835 – 1935 ) in Poland.

The National Speleological Society of the USA was later founded in 1941 ( originally formed as the Speleological Society of the District of Columbia on May 6, 1939 ) and the Swiss Society of Speleology created in 1939 in Geneva, but the first speleological institute in the world was founded in 1920 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, by Emil Racovita, a Romanian biologist, zoologist, speleologist and explorer of Antarctica.

Soon after his arrival in New York City ( January 2, 1939 ), Fermi began working at Columbia University, where he had already given summer lectures in 1936 While at Columbia from 1939 – 42, until they moved to Chicago, Fermi and his wife resided in Leonia, New Jersey.

On 25 January 1939, a Columbia University team conducted the first nuclear fission experiment in the United States, which was done in the basement of Pupin Hall ; the members of the team were Herbert L. Anderson, Eugene T. Booth, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G. Norris Glasoe, and Francis G. Slack.

Hawks followed this with the aviation drama Only Angels Have Wings, again starring Cary Grant and made in 1939 for Columbia Pictures.

He taught at Columbia from 1939 to 1946.

New York, N. Y .: Columbia University Press, 1939.

Hitchcock explained the term " MacGuffin " in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: " have a name in the studio, and we call it the ' MacGuffin '.

In early 1929, his daughter Christiane, married German indologist, Heinrich Zimmer, who taught at University of Greifswald, Heidelberg University, and Balliol College, Oxford ( 1939 – 1940 ), before moving to New Rochelle, New York, to become a Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at Columbia University.

While in Cutchogue on August 2, 1939, pipe-smoking Einstein was visited by fellow Jewish physicists from Hungary Leo Szilard ( who had produced a nuclear chain reaction in a laboratory at Columbia University ) and Eugene Wigner ( who both had been put up to it by Niels Bohr, and found his house after asking directions from a 7-year-old boy on the street ), and signed the famous July 16 Letter to President Roosevelt, alerting him to the new developments in nuclear physics and hinting that the Germans might be working on an atomic bomb, urging him to launch his own program.

The Southern Methodist Church, formed in Columbia, South Carolina, on January 14, 1939, as the continuing body of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, later established Southern Methodist College as an institution of the Church on January 26, 1956 in Greenville, moving to Aiken in 1958 and again to Orangeburg in 1961.

However, the series failed to garner attention, and by 1939, Mintz was largely indebted to Columbia Pictures.

: For the cartoons produced by Columbia Pictures from 1939 – 1946, see Phantasies.

Beecham conducted the orchestra in a series of 78-rpm recordings for Columbia Records, including a critically acclaimed 1939 recording of Brahms ' 2nd Symphony, which was later reissued on LP and CD.

The annual Golden Gloves tournament in British Columbia, Canada has been a regular event since 1939.

In 1939, the American Record Corp. was bought by the Columbia Broadcasting System for $ 750, 000, which discontinued the Brunswick label in 1940 in favor of reviving the Columbia label ( as well as reviving the OKeh label replacing Vocalion ).

* Mudge, Eugene T. The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Caroline ( New York: Columbia University Press 1939 ).

* Barker, Richard Hindry ( 1939 ) Mr Cibber of Drury Lane, New York: Columbia University Press.

His first radio speech was broadcast on September 15, 1939 over all three of the major radio networks ( Mutual, National, and Columbia ).

Publisher: Columbia University Press ( January 1, 1939 ).