There is a lot of discussion in this thread about intelligence, Hungarians, Jews, old central European schools and coffee shops, etc. In my experience, the mai

There is a lot of discussion in this thread about intelligence, Hungarians, Jews, old central European schools and coffee shops, etc. In my experience, the main conclusion I come to is: Humans are super TOUGH to characterize, measure meaningfully, predict, etc. SUPER tough. E.g., there is the stumbling block of the usual dichotomy of nature (i.e., genetics, DNA) and nurture (i.e., the environment of their childhood, etc.). We can try to focus on just the nature part, but again we get stumbling blocks of the wide variety of outcomes from, seemingly, too many factors. Sure, can give a test with 100 questions to millions of people and then use the linear algebra principle components decomposition to find 100 orthogonal factors and eigenvalues. Then there is a claim that IQ is just the largest of the 100 factors. Sooooo, that omits 99 other factors. Hmm .... Then, tough to have much faith in IQ. So, we can suspect that the other 99 factors can help or ruin the effect of the IQ factor. In my experience, that can happen. I'm not Jewish or Hungarian and have never made any particular effort to have contact with either, but one way and another by accident or forces unknown at the time to me have had some contact. So: (a) Dad thought that a big advantage would be a college education so I got one. (b) Mom thought that a big advantage would be a Ph.D. so I got one. So did my brother. (c) In grades 1-8, the teachers regarded me as in the bottom half of the class, maybe near or at the bottom of the class. So I tended to give up on school or trying to do well. My parents were fine with that. (d) I'm a male, and, as is common for boys, by the 8th grade my handwriting was still a mess. So, with that mess, my accuracy in 8th grade arithmetic was poor, and the teacher warmly advised me never to take anymore math. (e) In the 9th grade, I saw that I could do well in math so did. My main motivation was to reverse the 8 years of the teachers treating me as a poor student. Sooooo, that was the goofy reason I got into math. Lesson: A lot of what happens to people can be from just goofy reasons that have nothing to do with IQ or ability. The school I went to in grades 1-12 was intended as the city's premier college prep school. Supposedly 97% of the students went on to college. Since there was no Jewish high school in town, the Jewish kids also went to that school. Then in the Math SATs, of #1, #2, #3, I was #2 and #1 and #3 were Jewish. I had done nearly as well or a little better than both of them in grade 9-12 math classes. I had made no effort to compete: I had come to like math and enjoyed cutting off insults from the teachers. I didn't see anything very special about the abilities of the Jewish students. As I continued in math, I heard about several of the names of the Jewish Hungarian mathematicians in the OP: Halmos remains my favorite author. Once I got von Neumann's Quantum Mechanics and got through the first half, just some math, the physics was later, easily enough before got interrupted by other work. Von Neumann's game theory work was heavily around the saddle point result, and that is an easy result of duality in the linear algebra of linear programming. I heard about Wigner since my ugrad honors paper was on group representations for molecular spectroscopy. Early in my career, I was at GE as they took Kemeny's work on Basic and timesharing, etc. and made a business out of it. Later I was reading Feynman's Lectures and saw his remark that a particle of unknown position has uniform probability distribution over all of space. If that space has the usual assumption of infinite area, then there can be no such distribution. For the Manhattan Project picture of von Neumann, Feynman, and Ulam, once I used Ulam's result tightness in a paper I published. Once I published a paper on a fine detail about the (Karush) Kuhn-Tucker conditions. Later I saw that the famous paper of Arrow (mentioned in the OP), Hurwicz, and Uzawa mentioned a problem, and my work solved that problem also. The Chair of my Ph.D. orals committee was Jewish -- the brightest prof in his department was not Jewish or Hungarian. Point: I've never had any ambitions to be at the top of academics, but I have not found that work the Jews or Hungarians do is too difficult to understand or, in some cases, extend. As an example of the influence of the other 99 factors, maybe the brightest person I knew was my wife. She was Valedictorian, PBK, Summa Cum Laude, ..., etc. But some of those 99 factors proved fatal. Concluding Suggestion: When see some good work, e.g., the Halmos work on sufficient statistics, a good performance of the Bach Chaconne, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjEVKxQCWs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjEVKxQCWs or the Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto no.2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGOihjqO9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGOihjqO9w etc., just be glad for such good parts of civilization, credit the person doing the work, and f'get about whatever 100 factors, nature, nurture, etc. were the cause.