The Martians of Budapest

> Otto Frisch remembers that his friend Fritz Houtermans [..] proposed the popular theory that "these people were really visitors from Mars"

His Wikipedia article goes into more details:

> Houtermans had a great sense of humor. Many have commented on this, and one of his colleagues, Haro von Buttlar, collected stories told by Houtermans and privately published them in a book with more than 40 pages. One story purports to explain the contributions of seven of the twentieth century's most exceptional scientists, Theodore von Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller, all Hungarians. According to Houtermans, they are Martians, who are afraid that their accents will give them away, so they masquerade as Hungarians, i.e., people unable to speak any language but Hungarian without an accent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Houtermans#Personal

The fact that IQ tests can predict longevity is interesting.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC30556/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothian_birth-cohort_studies

John von Neumann=54, Paul Erdős=83, Eugene Wigner=93, Leó Szilárd=66, Edward Teller=95, Theodore von Kármán=82, John Hersányi=80, John G. Kemeny=66, Paul Halmos=90, George Pólya=98

I believe there are a couple of factors at play here.

First of all, most (perhaps all) of those people are Hungarian Jews, and Jewish people (imho) are both very intelligent and their culture values education a lot. Hungary had a very large Jewish population at the time, so no wonder we produced so many great scientists!

Second is the Hungarian language. Ede Teller specifically said his scientific achievements are thanks to the Hungarian language, and without it he could only be a high school teacher. I can find a few sources if you want, and the ones I know about might not be accurate, but for example Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who spoke 58 languages himself, said of our language: “Do you know which language, because of its constructive ability and the harmony of its rhythm, comes before all the others? The Hungarian! It seems as if the Hungarians themselves do not know the treasure of their language…”.

Third Hungary at that point was a rather developed country, unlike now. Budapest metro opened after the London one, as the worlds' second.

Edit: Fourth, not related to the previous 3 as not unique to Hungary, but there were probably "network effects" at play. Science does not happen in a vacuum, as Paul Erdos said for him maths is a social activity (as witnessed by his vagabond tendency to move in with his peers and work on problems while living at their house). So probably having all these great minds in related fields was a kind of a feedback loop.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRdAp4A5KEA&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...

Part of the article is missing, in the section about the high school years, above "of von Kármán in 1872". Many of that group went to high schools in a very small geographical area.

On the European side, it was one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage seen at a civilizational scale. At the American end, it was a boon. There were more Noble prize winners hanging around coffee machines than you could shake a stick at.

The analysis fails to account for this; for e.g. they weren't intelligent just because they were of jewish heritage. They fled because they were intelligent and jewish. And those who didn't flee were killed. Is it any wonder that a list of fleeing European geniuses that the US govt. allowed entry into the States is dominated by jewish geniuses?

Out of this list, the only anomaly that truly stands out, and is perhaps the reason why the term "The Martians" was coined is John von Neumann. Quoting from a prior comment,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25455028

It is difficult to overstate just how smart and well rounded von Neumann was. Most contemporary accounts are from the outside looking in, but his mind was truly extraordinary. He wasn't just a genius in one capacity, but he was a genius in every capacity. It is tempting to think of him as a savant, but he was far from it. He was social, brilliant, artistic, ethically considerate, and gifted in every sense of the word. His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia. And it becomes more and more obvious the closer you get to him.

One of the best memoirs I've read is that of Marina Whitman née von Neumann, his daughter. It is her memoir, with her memories and her extraordinary life and career. But her genesis was this extraordinary being. von Neumann doted on her. He loved her and tried to fulfil the whole of her extraordinary being and train her gifted mind. The result was a woman who became an extraordinarily perceptive economist who helped guide some of the economic policy of the United States. In a way, this wasn't unexpected, as she was, of course, von Neumann's bridge to the future.

I would like to avoid reducing her story to him, but she offers a unique, familial glimpse into his mind. The early parts of her book deal with her father, and talk about his extraordinary mind. It's genuinely hard to capture the true dimensions of his mental prowess. And it's harder to capture the fact that he knew it and he tried to do his best to live up to it. That's what's so special about von Neumann. He wasn't just the greatest mind of the past millennia in sheer intellectual throughput and ability; he was a mind willing to make sacrifices to leave the Earth better than he found it. As his daughter puts it,

> Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations.

and,

> But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.

He became cynical over time. She describes his deep pessimism of humanity; something compounded by The Bomb. But then again who hasn't become a pessimist with time? He still tried to fix humans and give them things that would help move them forward. And yes, I'm talking about him separately from the rest of humanity, because his mind was profoundly different from the rest of humanity. As the article quotes Hans Bethe's famous saying, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." He was The Martian.

I don't wish to spoil the book for those who'd like to read it, but the prologue is heart wrenching. He died far too young. I can't imagine what he might have transformed had he lived into his nineties and hundreds.

> The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father's involvements, absolute privacy was essential when, in the early stages of his hospitalization, various top-ranking members of the military-industrial establishment sat at his bedside to pick his brain before it was too late. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), along with General Bernard Schriever and my father, was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father's everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.

And this, the saddest part,

> After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—mathematician of the twentieth century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like seven and six or ten and three, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I could remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of his intellectual powers remained.

> I could only choke out a couple of these pairs of numbers and then, without even registering his answers, fled the room in tears. Months earlier we had talked, with a candor rare for the time, about the fact that, at a shockingly young age and in the midst of an extraordinarily productive life, he was going to die. But that was still a father-daughter discussion, with him in the dominant role. This sudden, humiliating role reversal compounded both his pain and mine. After that, my father spoke very little or not at all, although the doctors couldn't offer any physical reason for his retreat into silence. My own explanation was that the sheer horror of experiencing the deterioration of his mental powers at the age of fifty-three was too much for him to bear. Added to this pain, I feared, was my apparent betrayal of his dreams for his only child, his link to the future which was being denied to him.

Whitman, Marina. The Martian's Daughter (p. 3). University of Michigan Press. Kindle Edition.

https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Daughter-Memoir-Marina-Whitm...

On a more shameless note, I'm compiling this as a part of my Project Karl. It's one of those books that I think everyone should know about and read, but few do. https://www.projectkarl.com

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

From John von Neumann's wikipedia article. Fascinating idea.

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

or the

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto no.2

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8maetlPd8Q

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

This article is great read, well researched and quoted. Still, I think what it really misses to hit home and hammer down is the context and background where it all came from: the unbelievable greatness of the math education and math teachers of this country with streak going on over 100 years even though we might be at the end tail now (but still, great results still being achieved at the math olympics, if that is a metric that would matter to the reader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38xeYPAUPd0).

So while the Martians are of course worthy of accolades since their (+ || -) contributions and their unique and sad background are much more exceptional than every one of their peers but they weren't just one off geniuses. They were a culmination of many things.

From year to year, like some american sports draft an unusually high output of great systems thinkers and numbermongers entered almost all fields of real sciences.

It all starts perhaps w/ Sipos Pal, Farkas Gyula, and the father Bolyai Farkas, figureheads of Hungarian sciences of the 19th century. They set down the basics of sciences education of Hungary with decades of hard work. They and their peers organised societies for math and physics and later started publishing KoMal math journal - mentioned in the article - in 1891 which is still active to this day) to be able to build out common curriculum integrating the advanced concepts of the time, Bolyai also traveled Europe went to Gottingen and befriended Gauss to start creating continental connections. The wider context always proved to be favorable except the abhorrent times of 2nd world war. But even then, these amazing people of course had to flee for their lives but during their childhood they were able to develop their crafts because first the Austro-Hungarian Empire then also the interwar "kingdom" needed to display intellectual sovereignty and then when socialism slided in, that regime was highly interested in praising the sciences instead of religion, and also did good by opening up universities and education in general for the women the poor the peasents. For the past 150 years, up until now this also meant that being sciences teacher in elementary or high-school were most respectable and lifelong vocations held in high regard in these societies. It's an incredibly delicate and complicated topic that I might not have the vocabulary to flesh out fully.

So to get back to the main poin, that the Martians weren't Martians in the context of the history of maths in Hungary. By the time the next generation grew up the flood gates have opened, here's a semi-random sampling sans Martians, starting from 1802 until 1960s, the main epicenters being Transylvania -> Budapest -> Szeged -> Budapest && Debrecen && Szeged, so it was really not just a locality in say 1 city:

son Bolyai Janos, Eotvos Lorand, Valyi Gyula, Konig Denes & brother Konig Gyorgy, Fejer Lipot, Szego Gabor, Riesz Frigyes & brother Marcell, Haar Alfred, Szokefalvy-nagy father & son (before the Martians these 4 were the first generation of widely famous Hungarian mathematicians, I believe), Szego Gabor, Egervary Jeno, Kerekjarto Bela, Lanczos Kornel, Rado Tibor, Nemenyi Pal, Redei Laszlo, Kalmar Laszlo, Janossy Lajos, the couple Szekeres Eszter and Gyorgy, Peter Rozsa, Hajos Gyorgy, the power couple Turan Pal and T. Sos Vera, Gallai Tibor, Fejes Toth Laszlo, Suranyi Janos, Bodo Zalan, Erdos' favourite pal Renyi Alfred, Fary Istvan, Lax Peter, Csaszar Akos, Hajnal Andras, Aczel Janos, Csakany Bela, Szemeredi Endre, Bollobas Bela, Lovasz Laszlo, Csirmaz Laszlo, Tusnady Gabor, Barany Imre, Babai Laszlo, Furedi Zoltan, Komjath Peter, Pach Janos, Stipsicz Andras

(Important to note that as in many fields these great scientists were also teaching, and many of the teachers below were also researching and publishing.)

My heart and admiration goes out to all these brilliant minds. It's all due to the opportunity to learn, which was made available through the works and sacrifices of great teachers:

Ratz Laszlo has been portrayed in the article but there are more:

Sutak Jozsef, Arany Daniel, Konig Gyula, Farago Andor & brother Laszlo, Bauer Mihaly, Jordan Karoly, Szele Tibor, Soos Paula, Varga Otto, Szasz Pal, Kunfalvi Rezso, Bakos Tibor, Szenassy Barna, Imrecze Zoltanne, Farkas Miklos, Rabai Imre, Posa Lajos, Pataki Janos, and the many unnamed dedicated and humane teachers who worked hard every day with every class.

(And not to forget Kulin Gyorgy, who founded amateur astronomy in Hungary and is the most important astronomy teacher and discoverer of our country.)

I wouldn't know this much if not for the collected writings of Vekerdi Laszlo, a great historian of maths educators and mathematicians of the country and Szenassy Barna who wrote a huge monography.

Unfortunately there aren't many good links in [EN] except for Wikipedia but I tried to extend on the part of the article that I think it is crucial for correct understanding and historical clarity. I wish I would have time to write a sentence or two about each of these names. I can't do that right now but there are some great books in English to read for those who are interested.

How odd but how great. It's a disaster and hard to quantify the loss caused by the fascistic decade or so.

And to the author, lastly: Thanks for spreading the word!