Foregoers

(b. 1900, d. 1996) Maria Telkes first became interested in the problems of solar power as a high-school student. She came to the United States in 1925 with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Budapest. After working at several public and private organizations as a researcher, in 1939 she came to the […]

(b. 3/26/1913, Budapest, d. 9/20/1996 Warsaw) Erdős, do this his overly protective mother, was mostly home educated until his late teenage years.  His genius was discovered at a very early age, when at 3 after having been introduced to integers and subtraction, he derived negative numbers. Since his father introduced him to prime numbers at […]

(b. 12/13/1887 Budapest, d. 9/7/1985 Palo Alto, California) Born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, Polya worked in probability, analysis, number theory, geometry, combinatorics and mathematical physics. He left Hungary for Brown University for two years and later took up an appointment at Stanford. He enjoyed the esteem of the mathematical community not only for his […]

(b. 3/30/21 Budapest, d. 2/1/70 Budapest) Alfréd Rényi received a literary, rather than scientific, schooling in Budapest and Szeged. His studies were interrupted in 1944, when he was forced to a Nazi Labor Camp, but somehow managed to escape and even rescue his parents from the ghetto. After the war he finished his PhD studies […]

Imre Kertész(1929-2016). Recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”. The Academy singled out his 1975 debut novel, “Sorstalansag” (“Fateless”), in which he writes about a young man who is arrested and taken to a concentration camp but conforms […]

János (John C.) Harsányi (1920-) was born in Budapest, and educated at one of the best schools, the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, with such distinguished alumni as John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics together with John Nash and Reinhard Selten „for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in […]

György (George A.) Oláh (1927-) was born in Budapest. He was educated at the Technical University of Budapest. Dr. Oláh left Hungary in 1956 soon after the failed uprising against Communist rule and moved to the United States. In the field of modern organic chemistry his works overthrew the dogmas of the quattro chemical valency […]

Elie Wiesel (1928-) was born in Máramarossziget, now Sighet, Transylvania. During World War II, he, with his family and other Jews from the area, were deported to the German concentration and extermination camps, where his parents and little sister perished. He is the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize „because He was one of […]

John C. Polanyi (1929-)was born in Berlin from Hungarian parents, Michael and Magda Elizabeth Polanyi. The family moved to England in 1933. He obtained his B.Sc. in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1952 at Manchester University. He shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Dudley R. Herschbach and Yuan Tseh Lee „for contributions […]

Dénes (Dennis) Gábor (1900-1979) was born in Budapest as the oldest son of Bertalan Gabor, director of a mining company, and his wife Adrienne. He graduated from the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1924 and received his Doctorate there in 1927, in electrical engineering. He ranks as one of the pioneers of the theory of […]