* 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.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, " Black Destroyer " ( Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939 ), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin.

The initial funds were released in September, and the 11-tube prototype was first demonstrated in October, 1939.

In 1939, coinciding with the start of World War II, Rene Dubos reported the discovery of the first naturally derived antibiotic, gramicidin from B. brevis.

Since the first pioneering efforts of Florey and Chain in 1939, the importance of antibiotics, including antibacterials, to medicine has led to intense research into producing antibacterials at large scales.

* 1939 – The Grapes of Wrath, by American author John Steinbeck is first published by the Viking Press.

In 1939 Grothendieck went to France and lived in various camps for displaced persons with his mother, first at the Camp de Rieucros, and subsequently lived for the remainder of the war in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he was sheltered and hidden in local boarding-houses or pensions.

The first female member Florence Rankin joined AA in March 1937, and the first non-Protestant member, a Roman Catholic, joined in 1939.

Informally known as " The Big Book " ( with its first 164 pages virtually unchanged since the 1939 edition ), it suggests a twelve-step program in which members admit that they are powerless over alcohol and need help from a " higher power "; seek guidance and strength through prayer and meditation from God or Higher Power of their own understanding ; take a moral inventory with care to include resentments ; list and become ready to remove character defects ; list and make amends to those harmed, and then try to help other alcoholics recover.

The world's first fatal hijacking occurred on 28 October 1939.

The Beowulf manuscript was transcribed from an original by two scribes, one of whom wrote the first 1939 lines and a second who wrote the remainder, so the poem up to line 1939 is in one handwriting, whilst the rest of the poem is in another.

The first wave of the Government Code and Cypher School ( GC & CS ) moved to Bletchley Park on 15 August 1939.

It first appeared in September 1939, by a Times newspaper reporter.

Bundaberg rum was first produced in 1888, production ceased from 1907 to 1914 and from 1936 to 1939 after fires, the second of which caused rum from the factory to spill into the nearby Burnett River.

( The first edition was published in 1939.

* Andreas Gruentzig ( 1939 – 1985 ), first developed balloon angioplasty

From 1938 to 1945, he held a succession of positions, first becoming senior history master at Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon in 1938 ( and also a Captain in the school's OTC ), then instructor at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth in 1939.

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.

* Cardinal ( grape ), a table grape first produced in California in 1939

* Naughty But Mice ( 1939, debuts Sniffles, first Jones-created series character )

There were plans for races at Zandvoort before World War II: the first street race was held on June 3, 1939.

The fact that the Sun has a million-degree corona was first discovered by Gotrian in 1939 and Bengt Edlén in 1941 by identifying the coronal lines ( observed since 1869 ) as transitions from low-lying metastable levels of the ground configuration of highly ionized metals ( the green FeXIV line at 5303 Å, but also the red line FeX at 6374 Å ).