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It's difficult to generalize, but by pretty much any metric you choose Hungary produced a massively disproportionate share of the outstanding mathematicians of
by underwoodley 9y ago
It's difficult to generalize, but by pretty much any metric you choose Hungary produced a massively disproportionate share of the outstanding mathematicians of the twentieth century.
- tehlike 9y agocan you give couple examples that are most prominent?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- richchurcher 9y agoWould Paul Erdős be the most famous? There's even a Wikipedia subcategory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:20th-century_Hungarian_mathematicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:20th-century_Hungaria....
- niftich 9y agoJános Bolyai [1], Theodore von Kármán [2], Leo Szilard [3], Dennis Gabor [4], Edward Teller [5], Paul Erdős [6], John von Neumann [7]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Bolyai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Bolyai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_Kármán https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_Kármán [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
- tehlike 9y agoI am curious if it's because they are hungarian, or because they are jewish. Jews pay particular attention to science and arts, from what I gather from my jewish friends. Nobel laureates, for example, have disproportionate amount of jewish among them (compared to jewish population as a percentage of world population).
- underwoodley 9y agoYou don't have to be curious for more than five minutes. Several of those mentioned are Jewish, but most of them are not. There are not disproportionately more Jewish Hungarian mathematicians, compared to the proportion of say, Jewish people in Budapest before WWII, or the proportion of Jewish people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Looking only at the first half of the twentieth century, there at least as many world-ranking mathematicians from Hungary as from Poland, a country with a strong mathematical tradition, a much larger population, and a massively larger Jewish population (around a quarter of the Jewish people in the world in the 1930s). It's worth adding that comparing the proportion of Jewish Nobel prize winners to Jewish people in the world might not be a fair comparison. Much of this can probably be explained by the strong correlation between being European (including Russian/Soviet) or American, and being a Nobel prize winner.
- ezequiel-garzon 9y agoYou don’t have to be very curious to find out that about 22% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish [1], which leaves your controversial Western population at under 100 million even stretching the worldwide Jewish population to 20 million. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureat...
- roi 9y agoExcept for Bolyai, all mentioned above are indeed Jewish. Also all mentioned in your other comment (Fejér etc.) except Bollobás. Also Wigner, mentioned in another comment.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- underwoodley 9y agoI stand corrected. I wrongly believed that many of these including Fejer and von Neumann were not Jewish. I think the comparison with other populations such as Poland still seems to point out that something about Hungary in the 20th century was special, other than the presence of many Jewish people.
- patkai 9y agoI would add Eugene Wigner, also Nobel laureate.
- underwoodley 9y agoAlso Fejér, Turán, Rényi, F. Riesz and M. Riesz, Bollobás
- dgut 9y agoWith the exception of Bolyai, those are all Jewish. AFAIK Hungary did push above its weight for some time, but that was thanks to its Jewish population. Ironically Hungarians are extremely antisemitic, although nearly all known Hungarians were/are Jewish. Good riddance!
- zoltaan 9y agoInteresting list since they received quite heterogeneous and many times mixed education, home vs. institution, Hungarian vs. foreign, also their adult achievements were many times reached/mastered in other than the educating country. As long as the measure is the production of little children inside one of the historic borders of Hungary (or maybe elsewhere by at least one Hungarian-born parent) who later contributed to mathematics notably, this or that way, here and there, then Hungary is really good at math!
- moab 9y agohttp://www.jurisich-koszeg.sulinet.hu/files/projekt/science/The_most_famous_Hungarian_Scientists.pdf http://www.jurisich-koszeg.sulinet.hu/files/projekt/science/... The first 5 pages have names that are attached to lots and lots of theorems (disproportionately in combinatorics).
- a_imho 9y agoGeorge Olah passed away in March.
- a_imho 9y agoRecently Laszlo Babai, Endre Szemeredi, Mario Szegedy In undergraduate studies the names Denes Konig, Tibor Gallai also come up discussing graphs.
- 0xdada 9y agoHere's a footnote about Hungarian mathematicians in the 20th century from Prime Obsession. Amazing book by the way, highly recommended. George Pólya (1887−1985). Look at those dates—another immortal. Pólya was Hungarian. Even more striking than the rise of the Germans in the early nineteenth century was the rise of Hungarians in the early twentieth. While the German states (excluding Austria and Switzerland) in 1800 had about 24 million people, the Hungarian-speaking population of Hungary was around 8.7 million in 1900, and I believe never rose above 10 million. This small and obscure nation produced an astonishing proportion of the world’s finest mathematicians: Bollobás, Erdélyi, Erdős, Fejér, Haar, Kerékjártó, two Kőnigs, Kürschák, Lakatos, Radó, Rényi, two Rieszes, Szász, Szegő, Szokefalvi-Nagy, Turán, von Neumann, and I have probably missed a few. There is a modest literature attempting to explain this phenomenon. Pólya himself thought that the major factor was Fejér (1880−1959), an inspiring teacher and gifted administrator, who attracted and encouraged mathematical talent. A high proportion of the great Hungarian mathematicians (including Fejér) were Jewish—or, like Pólya’s parents, “social” converts to Christianity, of originally Jewish stock.