Marie Bydžovská, née Komínková, was a native of Veselí and, together with her husband, academician Bydžovský, was one of the city's respected citizens. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague and was one of the first women with a university education. For many years she was a professor at the Prague Girls' Gymnasium Minerva. She was a historian, writer, regional researcher and translator from French. Together with Amália Fleischhansová, she actively participated in the journalistic and promotional activities of the Czech Tourists' Club in Veselí.

Bydžovský's tenure at the Ministry was not long but it was significant in laying the foundations of secondary education in Czechoslovakia. Bydžovský was the first author of curricula and outlines for this level of the school system. ... The curricula and principles, in terms of organisation, took into account the need to unify secondary education in Bohemia and Moravia with secondary schools in Slovakia as much as possible. In terms of content, they naturally meant changes in the teaching of Czech, Slovak, history and geography. When designing them, Bydžovský also made sure that science education was strengthened in grammar schools and humanities education in secondary schools.

A general plane elliptic quartic can be reproduced by nine quadratic transformations, seven of which form a group with the identity, the other two not belonging to it. All the elements necessary to demonstrate this proposition are already found in earlier works on these curves, and in particular in the well-known work of Casey on bicircular quartics; nevertheless, credit must be given to M Ciani for having recently carried out a systematic study of these transformations, in which he has brought out their essential properties and also considered several special cases I studied the same question without being aware of M Ciani's work, which was not available to me at the time of its publication, and I realised the possibility of elliptic quartics reproducing themselves through a greater number of quadratic transformations than in the general case. By extending the problem somewhat, I set out to determine all the plane elliptic quartics whose number of quadratic transformations differs from that of the general case. I will briefly outline the procedure I followed, as well as the main results I obtained.

Such a transformation has a quadratic manifold in (n-2) dimensions, every point of which is principal in the sense that all points on a line correspond to it. It also has a principal point, which can be called isolated, and to which the points of a hyperplane correspond. The united points of such a transformation form two quadratic manifolds, one in n dimensions and the other in (n-h-2) dimensions. Here, h can take all integer values ​​between -1 and (n-1), the value -1 corresponding to the case where the manifold in question contains no points, i.e., where there exists only one quadratic manifold of united points, which is, in this case, a hyperquadric. This is the case of inversion, a well-known correspondence, in which collinear points correspond to a fixed point, the centre of the inversion, and are, at the same time, polar conjugates with respect to the hyperquadric just mentioned. I have found, concerning these transformations, the following theorem:

Jan Bydžovský graduated from a real gymnasium, then from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University, where in 1930 he obtained a license to teach mathematics and physics at gymnasiums, and at the same time passed state exams in insurance mathematics and statistics. In 1932-35 he worked at the General Pension Institute, where he dealt with international aspects of the implementation of insurance contracts, and in September 1935 he moved to the International Labour Office in Geneva. ... In the summer of 1940, he became involved in the activities of the Czechoslovak resistance. In April 1941 he managed to get from Geneva via Portugal to London and was accepted into the service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czechoslovak government in exile. Initially, he was assigned to the study department, and from December 1942 until the end of the war, he headed the cipher department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Jan Bydžovský continued to work at the Foreign Ministry until December 1949, when he was arrested by the StB (the secret police force in communist Czechoslovakia) on suspicion of espionage. In the following period, the StB tried to fabricate charges against Jan Bydžovský for participation in the murder of Jan Masaryk [son of Tomáš Masaryk who had taught Bohumil Bydžovský] which he was supposed to have committed on the instructions of the Czech exiles; after repeated psychological and physical torture, Jan Bydžovský signed a "confession", but the planned show trial failed and he was eventually sentenced to 18 years for espionage in 1951. At the end of 1955 he was released ...

The immense suffering of his father and mother was obvious to anyone who saw Academician Bydžovský and his wife at that time, although Academician Bydžovský, given his nature, never showed more than was obvious to those who knew him well. When his son Jan returned in 1955 and was fully rehabilitated in 1965, Academician Bydžovský truly rejuvenated and blossomed again, albeit only for a short time.

Five possible incidence-tables for a configuration (12_4,16_3) were enumerated by Zacharias [(1948) and (1952)]. The fifth one has a geometrical realisation in the real projective plane, where it contains the three points of inflection and the nine sextactic points of an elliptic cubic curve. The author finds that these twelve points lie by threes on 19 lines, 16 of which belong to a special kind of Hessian configuration [Feld, Amer. Math. Monthly (1936)]. The new configuration is obtained by making a different choice of the 3 to omit. He finds that the same incidence-table has, in the complex projective plane, a second realisation in which the twelve points do not lie on a cubic curve. He gives coordinates for all of them. Finally, he exhibits, with a good drawing, a new real configuration whose twelve points likewise fail to lie on a cubic curve (although their coordinates involve a cubic irrationality).

After the war, as a first-year student at the then Faculty of Science of Charles University in Prague, I met Professor Bydžovský at the beginning of 1946; until then, his analytic geometry seminar had been substituted. All of us, his students, soon became extremely fond of Professor Bydžovský, especially those of us who had also studied algebraic geometry in the higher grades. His seminars will remain unforgettable for us, in which he gently, almost unnoticed, introduced us, his students, to independent scientific work. His principle was: Every mathematician must solve at least one problem a day; otherwise, he is not a mathematician. In this way, he expressed his conviction that mathematics requires daily work, but it was clear to all of us that he primarily adhered to this principle himself. His lectures and seminars were so perfectly prepared and presented with such care and elegance, and with such formality, that we all looked forward to them. In all respects, he educated us primarily by leading by example. During examinations, his principle was to test what the student could do, not what the student could not do. He was always very happy when the student did well in the examination. But he could also calm down a student who stumbled during the examination. He was not impatient, nor did he ever make fun of the student. He could point out a mistake objectively, but at the same time extremely tactfully.

I had few students, but they were very talented and diligent, and I lectured on differential geometry. This field, which otherwise lay outside my scientific interests, I always liked immensely for the elegance and flexibility of its methods. And so I lectured well in my last year, especially since the students had completed a regular course in differential geometry and I could tackle the higher and deeper problems of that beautiful science. However, those lectures still cost me a lot, but they were nice work.