* 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.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche ( Wylie: Chos rgyam Drung pa ; February 28, 1939 – April 4, 1987 ) was a Buddhist meditation master and holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, the eleventh Trungpa tülku, a tertön, supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries, scholar, teacher, poet, artist, and originator of a radical re-presentation of Shambhala vision.

Born in the Kham region of Tibet in February 1939, Chögyam Trungpa was eleventh in the line of Trungpa tülkus, important figures in the Kagyu lineage, one of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

Kyabje Gelek Rimpoche () is a Tibetan Buddhist lama who was born in Lhasa, Tibet in 1939.

The 1938 – 1939 German expedition to Tibet was an expedition that arrived to Tibetan territory in 1939 and was led by Ernst Schäfer.

The Five Tibetan Rites is a system of exercises reported to be more than 2, 500 years old which were first publicized by Peter Kelder in a 1939 publication entitled The Eye of Revelation.

In 1939 her book, Twenty Jataka Tales ( ISBN 978-0892813230 ), inspired by the Jātaka tales of Buddhist tradition, was published in London.

The majority Buddhist Karens were not organised until 1939 with the formation of a Buddhist KNA.

His lectures on Buddhist psychology at the University of Patna were published in 1939 as The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy, and his lectures at Shantinekan as Psycho-Cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa in 1940.

One American who attempted to establish an American Buddhist movement was Dwight Goddard ( 1861 – 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.

Over the past several decades ( dating back to at least 1939 ), a controversial movement of monks and meditation masters, later called the Dhammakaya Movement, has developed in Thailand.

Lotna is Wajda's meditation on the historical breaking point that was 1939, as well as a reflection on the ending of an entire era for literature and culture in Poland and in Europe as a whole.

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.

On 3 October 1939 he was the commanding instructor for Haganah Leader's courses held at Yavniel when two British Palestine Police Officers discovered a quantity of illegal rifles.

From 1935 to 1939 he served as junior instructor in the Defence League Viljandi County Territorial Regiment, between 1939-1940 in the Lääne County Territorial Regiment.

He was an instructor at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to 1939 and at Armour Institute of Technology ( now Illinois Institute of Technology ) from 1939 to 1948.

After learning to fly powered aircraft in 1935, and graduating as a Sub-Lieutenant, he went on to serve as a fighter pilot posted to 161 Fighter Squadron in Lwów, and later, in 1939, as a flying instructor at Deblin.

He was an instructor at the University of Chicago as well as Columbia University, where he received his Ph. D. in Germanic Studies in 1939.

In 1939, at the age of 28, Xiao Qian returned to England to work as an instructor in modern Chinese language for the School of Oriential and African Studies ( SOAS ) in London.

From 1939 until 1961 he was at Cornell University, first as an instructor, then from 1943 as assistant professor and from 1947 as full professor.

Howe worked as an art instructor at Pierre High School in 1939.

Seiichi Sugano ( 菅野誠一 17 December 1939 – 29 August 2010 ) was a Japanese aikido instructor who lived and taught in many Western countries.