Why So Many Great Scientists Come From Hungary

Video on John von Neumann: The Scientist Who Invented the Future

Newsthink is produced and presented by Cindy Pom

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[Newsthink]

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[ZRD]

Legend says, when Roosevelt left the meeting he had with his team of scientific consultants, one of them said: "Gentlmen, I think we can continue in hungarian."

[MattRamsey-pv]

Edward Teller (who was actually Teller Ede born in Budapest, Hungary) said once that without the Hungarian language he would have just been a mediocre high school teacher... the logic of the Hungarian language gave him the gift of being able to think about things such a unique way...

[tiborjarfas]

Kiváncsian olvastam a többnyire Magyarságon kívüli Nemzetek méltatásait ! Megdöbbentett, hogy csak pozitívan nyilatkozó hozzászólók írásait olvashattam itt! Ami rendkívül figyelemre méltó, az a részletes informáltság népünkről! Köszönjük!

[SzBenedek]

In Hungary, the current school system is far inferior compared to the schools back then. Sadly those times are gone.

[januskaminsky]

When I was going to a Gimnazium (high school) in Hungary between 1978-1983, after going to a university in America, I didn't have to do anything for the first 2 years because I already learned that in high school. Surviving and passing math without failing was a cause to celebrate in Hungarian high schools. Even getting into high school was very difficult because you had to have a certain number of credits/high score threshold to pass in order to be accepted.

[igweogba]

If you can read and write the Hungarian language, you are already half way to becoming a genius

[rickmorrow]

I think the language is partly responsible. There are no prepositions in Hungarian. The language uses postposition tags so that you have to wait until the end of the sentence to find out who did what. It makes people better listeners. In English, we use lots of prepositions, so we know where the speaker is going before they are done, or so we think. Also, the language is completely phonetic. If you ask how to spell something and how to pronounce something, it is the same question. This saves about two years in language studies over English. English has its advantages, though. You can say just about anything in English. My son's second cousin is a math teacher in Hungary. When he was visiting, my son learned more in two days from him than he learned in an entire semester in high school. Another of my son's second cousins has finished his PhD in Engineering. He has done some post doctoral work at MIT and will be doing more at Cal Tech. One of my Hungarian friends has a PhD in Mathematics and is Erdos 2. Yes, there are a lot of brilliant Hungarians.

[billykotsos]

I went to Budapest recently.
I found out that they have a great history of scientific intellect.

[stevemorris]

My favourite description of a Hungarian was 'someone who enters a revolving door behind you but exits in front of you."
What a compliment!

[GeorgKallenbach]

I say it's the language.

It has so much choice, you can think in any way, you are hardly limited by expression (besides from a passive form).
All Hungarians I know are versatile and speak excellent English, German and some roman languages too.

There are so many ways to think around ordinary sentence structues to express yourself above just making statements.
You can even swear so melodically, if you put words in the right order to create tension and release like in a symphony.

I've been learning for two years and thinks Hungarian language is somewhat of the peak of human expression by now.

[luongo]

I am Vietnamese and Magyarország (Hungary) is one of my favorite countries. Her culture, people, land and history are SO BEAUTIFUL!!! I want to live there.🥰😍

[noahhubbard]

Many of these gymnasiums (a.k.a. high schools) inculcated a high-degree of self-confidence in their students’ willingness to trust in themselves an ability to learn. These schools encouraged their students to draw their own conclusions from their individual and communal curiosities. And if it so happened that the students’ curiosities led to an incorrect conclusion, then they were gently corrected yet encouraged to remain both curious and open to drawing conclusions elsewhere.

Learning starts with a belief in oneself that one CAN learn.

It reminds me of a quote (all caps are mine):

“Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in HOW TO LEARN. And the first lesson of all was the basic TRUST that he COULD learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.” - Frank Herbert, “Dune, ” 1965

[herrkulor]

Hungarians making Mercedes Benz safe ( Béla Barényi) and ball-pens and other inventions would also be an interesting video.

[szidoniamakranczi]

Bolyai János is worth to mention, he was a mathematical genius, who developed absolute geometry. Also Kőrösi Csoma Sándor, who was a prolific scientist, philologist, who wrote the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book. Also Torma Zsófia one of the first female archaeologists in the world, known for her significant work in prehistoric archaeology. All three of them have greatly contributed to the worlds scientific knowledge.

[_monoman]

For those who are constantly emphasizing the Jewish origin of these inventors/scientists, here are some facts and also several Non-Jew / Hungarian scientists:
1. As it was mentioned in the video these scientists were educated in Hungarian schools, in Hungarian language – one of the most difficult languages in the world – By the famous math teacher László Rátz – a Hungarian btw..
2. At 4:33 you can hear that: „Jews were elevated to the highest echelons of society” in the Austro-Hungarian empire. John Von Neumann’s father ’was a successful banker and economic advisor to the Hungarian Government’. It’s not hard to imagine that these influential Jewish families had (and still have) a very good „marketing” when it comes to promoting themselves. *Of course this does not detract from their merits*, I just want to emphasize that a Jewish scientist was much more easily in the limelight than non-Jewish scientists.
3. Here are some Non-Jew / Hungarian scientists that you may not know, they didn’t get very high publicity:
• Georg von Békésy - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1961)
• Farkas Bolyai - was a Hungarian mathematician, mainly known for his work in geometry.
• János Bolyai - was a Hungarian mathematician who developed absolute geometry—a geometry that includes both Euclidean geometry and hyperbolic geometry.
• Imre Bródy - was a Hungarian physicist who invented in 1930 the krypton-filled fluorescent lamps (also known as the krypton electric bulb) with fellow-Hungarian inventors Emil Theisz, Ferenc Kőrösy and Tivadar Millner.
• Loránd Eötvös - was a Hungarian physicist. He is remembered today largely for his work on gravitation and surface tension, and the invention of the torsion pendulum. Eötvös is remembered today for his experimental work on gravity, in particular his study of the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass (the so-called weak equivalence principle) and his study of the gravitational gradient on the Earth's surface. The weak equivalence principle plays a prominent role in relativity theory and the Eötvös experiment was cited by Albert Einstein in his 1916 paper The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity. Measurements of the gravitational gradient are important in applied geophysics, such as the location of petroleum deposits. The CGS unit for gravitational gradient is named the “Eotvos” in his honour.
• Charles Simonyi - Early Microsoft employee Charles Simonyi is the man behind some of the company's most successful software, including *Word and Excel.* The developer has a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford, and worked on one of the first personal computers at Xerox.
• Michael Somogyi - Was a Hungarian-American professor of biochemistry. He prepared the first insulin treatment given to a child with diabetes in the US in October 1922. Somogyi later showed that excessive insulin makes diabetes unstable in the Chronic Somogyi rebound to which he gave his name.
• Victor Szebehely - was a key figure in the development and success of the Apollo program. In 1956, a dimensionless number used in time-dependent unsteady flows was named "Szebehely's number, " (In the September and October 1977 issues of the journal Celestial Mechanics, volume 16, an equation used to determine the gravitational potential of the Earth, planets, satellites, and galaxies was named "Szebehely's equation".
• Albert Szent-Györgyi - was a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. *He is credited with first isolating vitamin C* and discovering many of the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle and the molecular basis of muscle contraction.
• Békésy György - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• Richard Adolf Zsigmondy - He was known for his research in colloids, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1925, as well as for co-inventing the slit-ultramicroscope and different membrane filters. The crater Zsigmondy on the Moon is named in his honour.
• Ferenc Anisits - Hungarian engineer, engine developer. He founded the BMW Diesel Development Center in Steyr, Austria.
• Oszkár Asboth - was an ethnic Hungarian aviation engineer sometimes credited with the invention of the helicopter.
• Béla Barényi - Barényi made numerous crash protection inventions, and is therefore regarded as the father of passive safety in automotive design.
Barényi is also credited with first conceiving the original design for the German people's car (the Volkswagen Beetle) in 1925, – notably by Mercedes-Benz, on their website, including his original technical drawing – five years before Ferdinand Porsche claimed to have made his initial version. Barényi was inducted into the Detroit Automotive Hall of Fame in 1994 and nominated for the award of Car Engineer of the Century in 1999.

• Ottó Bláthy - was a Hungarian electrical engineer. During his career he became the co-inventor of the modern electric transformer the tension regulator the AC watt-hour meter, the turbo generator, the high-efficiency turbo generator and the motor capacitor for the single-phase (AC) electric motor.
• János Csonka - was a Hungarian engineer, the co-inventor of the carburetor for the stationary engine with Donát Bánki, patented on 13 February 1893.
• Miksa Déri - was a Hungarian electrical engineer, inventor, power plant builder. He contributed with his partners Károly Zipernowsky and Ottó Bláthy, in the development of the closed iron core transformer and the ZBD model. His other important invention was the constant voltage AC electrical generator in the Ganz Works in 1883.
• József Galamb - was a Hungarian mechanical engineer most known as main-engineer for designing the Ford Model T.
• Csaba Horváth (chemical engineer) - was a Hungarian-American chemical engineer, particularly noted for building the first high-performance liquid chromatograph.
• János Irinyi - was a Hungarian chemist and inventor of the noiseless and non-explosive match.
• Kálmán Kandó - was a Hungarian engineer, the inventor of phase converter and a pioneer in the development of AC electric railway traction.
• Joseph Petzval - was a Hungarian mathematician, inventor, and physicist best known for his work in optics. Petzval's achievements are used today in cinematography, astronomy, and meteorology. The Astro-Petzval-Objektiv lens is used in astronomy. This objective made a distortion-free illustration of a large part of the sky, as well as permitting photographing of galaxies and star fields. German optics companies (Töpfer, Voigtländerkorrigie, Zeiss) produced the Petzval objective lens until the 1940s. Petzval's largest contributions to optics are his theoretical bases for the construction and correction of optical lens systems. He carried out fundamental work for the theory of aberration in optical systems.
• Tivadar Puskás - was a Hungarian inventor, telephone pioneer, and inventor of the telephone exchange. According to Edison, "Tivadar Puskas was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange". The first experimental telephone exchange was based on the ideas of Puskás, and it was built by the Bell Telephone Company in Boston in 1877.
• Ernő Rubik - is a Hungarian inventor. He is best-known for creating the Rubik's Cube (1974).
• Kálmán Tihanyi - was a Hungarian physicist, electrical engineer and inventor. One of the early pioneers of electronic television, he made significant contributions to the development of cathode ray tubes (CRTs), which were bought and further developed by the Radio Corporation of America (later RCA) and German companies Loewe and Fernseh AG. He invented and designed the world's first automatic pilotless aircraft in Great Britain. He is also known for the invention of the first infrared video camera in 1929, and coined the first flat panel plasma display in 1936. His Radioskop patent was recognized as a Document of Universal Significance by the UNESCO, and thus became part of the Memory of the World Programme on September 4, 2001.
The list is not complete.

[RendallRen]

They were not "The Martians" because of their foreign accents. They were "The Martians" in honor of their out-of-this-world, next-level genius.

[glenmartin]

Thank you.
Nicola Tesla was Serbian born in Croatia.
My mother and grandmother were born in Kansas, USA. Their ancestors were from the old Austrian Hungarian Empire. These people were and are my heroes.
Thanks, again.

[in-depthpen-dent]

Fun fact the inventor of the Rubik's cube Erno Rubik I from Hungary

[brucekives]

When talking about Hungarian Jews, how can you leave out Paul Erdős. He was the most prolific mathematician with 1, 500 mathematical papers published during his lifetime.