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It seems you're discriminating positively. The Jewish population in Hungary was very large at the time. Many of them were just farmers. Some of them were doctors and engineers and business-men. Those exceptional mathematicians were indeed an exception. This is not to negatively discriminate. Believing that an ethnicity has super-powers or super-flaws is a bias. You notice all the exceptions and don't notice all the other average samples that don't confirm your hypothesis. Also small sample of populations are just more likely to have extreme values. This is more because of the narrow sample.

Finally on the language part, great scientists flew nazi countries from all over Europe. Only some of them were Hungarian-speaking. Enrico Fermi was from Rome, from a not particularly religious Catholic family. Enrico Fermi went to the US for better opportunities AND to protect his wife Laura whom was Jewish.

> whom was Jewish.

Biased sample indeed. The brilliant scientists who had no reason to flee didn’t and it’s not surprising the reasons to flee are over represented in a sample taken from those who did.

I also suspect a lot of Jewish Hungarians who fled were not brilliant scientists, just rich or talented enough to afford escaping.

No, you misunderstand. In 80 years before or since, these dozen or so ethnically Jewish scientists were literally the only world-leading Hungarian scientists. (Maybe I would add Eotvos and Szenty-Gyorgyi, but that’s about it…)

Given that only 5% of the pre-WW2 population of Hungary was Jewish, the fact that 80% of geniuses were of Jewish parentage is highly unusual, emigration or not.

It's interesting that Hungarian is one of the few Uralic languages in modern Europe, alongside Finnish and Estonian as the other 2 major representatives. Finland and Estonian could be argued to have enjoyed outsized success in STEM fields as well. I wonder if there could be value in learning languages with divergent roots. Most Europeans learn multiple languages, but typically they have similar roots (Indo-European) and a fair amount of crossover.

There is some evidence for the weak form of linguistic relativity, the idea that language can have significant impact on cognition. Perhaps taken to the extreme, with learning many varied and highly divergent languages at a young age, it can explain some of e.g. von Neumann's brilliance.

As far as I know, even the weak form of linguistic relativity is heavily disputed.

Please see my sibling comment with a well-written article on a more likely reason.

Probably. But when Edward Teller himself states it, I tend to listen. Perhaps he said jokingly though.

I believe it. My wife is Hungarian and I'm trying to learn the language. I'm german myself and I think german is already quite complex, but Hungarian is just nuts (or probably martian). At some points I accused my teacher that she is just making stuff up on the fly ;)

I do believe that is the case and I have my pet layman unscientific theories too about languages. For example I believe English not being phonetic and often times pronounciation not making any sense trains people to accept things "as is", make them get over illogical things way easier. I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure.

Just a toy hunch I like to think about from time to time. I wish I could see English with its original alphabet before being forced into the confines of the latin one. Apparently many sounds are misrepresented due to that.

Lots of languages have orthographic depth. I doubt you'll find a correlation if you look at more than one or two languages/cultures. Heck, the French only pronounce half their letters, and they killed their monarchs.

Hungarian pretty much only does that to ease pronounciation, ie. when two consonants can't be pronounced after each other eg. "utca" (means street) etc.

> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK.

Whether the British are prone to respect authority because of their language is debatable. It's less debatable whether those in a larger Anglophone nation are prone to respect authority! Just look at some of the behaviours we've seen over the last 18 months.

> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure.

I doubt that as the largest country by English as a first language is the US and I wouldn't say that those folks on the whole respect authority in the same way that we do.

I think the way authority is respected in the UK has more to do with our endemic class system (which still exists) and the fact that unlike most European countries we never had a revolution in the last couple of centuries (came close at points and of course there was Cromwell but that was a different kind of revolution and much earlier).

I've observed the British respect other people, society and hierarchy. Not authority per se. That's the Germans heh.

There is a fringe theory, that agglutinative languages with consistent vocabulary are more effortless for children to learn. So children would spend less time learning and memorizing words, and could proceed faster to learn other things.

English vocabulary is a patchwork with origins from several different languages, so words with related meaning can look different. Whereas for example Finnish is consistent:

    kirjoittaa – to write
    kirjailija – writer
    kirja – book
    kirje – letter
    kirjasto – library
    kirjallisuus – literature
    kirjasin – font

In this way, you can learn the same vocabulary by learning maybe 5x smaller amount of root words.

http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/

I learned to read and write Hungarian in a matter of weeks. It is spelled phonetically, with only a handful of special cases. It's hilariously easy.

English is a random mish-mash of at least four languages, making it seem very random and ad-hoc. However, it mercifully uses the latin alphabet. Chinese is just a nightmare, with students spending most of their schooling just to become literate...

Which resources did you use to learn to rw Hungarian so fast?

I learned in the first few weeks of primary school. Most students achieved literacy in the same time frame, a few months at most for the slower kids.

My son, to everybody’s surprise, learned my(father) native language (Hungarian) much better than his mother’s native language (Ukrainian), even though we both are the only ones talking to him exclusively on our language, as we live in an English speaking country. He speaks Ukrainian ok, but his Hungarian is just perfect, and is at par with English. It was interesting, and I didn’t know what to attribute it to. Then we got another kid, and as he is approaching 18 months now I can see already he speaks way more Hungarian words also! Indeed, my anecdotal conclusion was that it must be the language (and mind you, the Ukrainian and Hungarian languages are absolutely different) that made the difference, everything else seemed the same, especially with WFH for the past 2 years.

The fact of Budapest being a rich city is not a surprising one because it was the capital of Hungary that was many times larger than today's Hungary, spreading from Split to Lemberg - to be reduced to "ethnic quarter" of Magyars after WWI. And every monarchy is a very center-leaning entity so the capital would concentrate wealth of the entire - much bigger than today - nation. It was a co-capital of Habsburg Empire on the same rights as Vienna.

Indeed, having its territory reduced by 73% after the war all but killed her. I mean Hungary was already on a downward trajectory after the 1526 Battle of Mohacs which she lost against the Ottomans, and that downward slope culminated in the Treaty of Trianon, which reduced the country to irrelevance ever since.

What can I say about it? It seems we like to be on the wrong side of history…

And looking at the Hungarian politics and geopolitics it's like you insist on being on a collision course with the majority of your closest neighbors. The odds of anything good coming out of that for Hungary are very slim IMHO.

Indeed. I’d love to better understand why it’s so hard not to side with the baddies every single time.

The best thing that comes out of this is that it’s easy to pinpoint the Nazis because they are the ones in power.

Not sure why you are being down voted.

I am conservative jewish, and of Hungarian descent on my mother's side. Russian on my fathers. Neither parent has a Ph.D. I do, and one of 2 brothers is a DDS, other is MS in CS. Daughter is double majoring in math and physics, with now a minor in complex systems. Going to grad school next year. She's half me, half my wife (Mexican American).

Conservative and orthodox jews tend to have quite a bit of familial pressure with regards to education. You are expected to go to school. Expected to excel. Expected to pursue a professional or medical career. I recall this growing up in the 1970s.

My dad is an EE, with a penchant for math. My mom is more psychologically inclined. Wife has an MS in Physics, and teaches college prep high school math. Daughter started out as an Art major. I kid you not. Transitioned over to Physics in her second year.

Ok, with that as the back story, a few observations.

Many of my fellow jewish students, easily a majority, have gone to post graduate education, and are doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers. Very few have not. The familial pressure was common, and we all talked about it in our groups. I see a very similar trend with Indian and Chinese American families. Same drive to succeed, with pushes from family.

Jews are not a "racial" group, we don't share locus of genes that can be used to easily identify us as such. Apart from certain families with markers for Tay-Sachs or others.

Conservative and Orthodox jews do share a culture where education is seen as the pathway to success, a better life, taking care of the extended family, etc. That is, its kind of built in to our way of life.

I interpret this to mean a number of things.

1) Genetics, while important, isn't the dominant feature of highly successful people.

2) Nurture, culture, society, support systems, etc. are the things that matter. Put another way, if you set low bars, you get results appropriate to setting of low bars. If you set high bars, and provide both a support system, and strong cultural motivation, you will get results appropriate to the setting of high bars.

For me, the martians have always been fascinating. JvN was foremost, though Paul Erdos was always a fascinating character. I don't think genetics/religion was the deciding factor for them. I think it was their environment. If it was an aberration for this time and place, or if it was common, that environment, the support systems behind it, should be studied, and leveraged.

> we don't share locus of genes that can be used to easily identify us as such

I'm one of the biggest critics when it comes to genetic reductionism, evopsych, etc and I know it's a touchy subject especially considering the terrible events that happened in WW2, and so on, but this is trivial to disprove.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_genetics_of_Jews

> Due to their historical endogamy over the centuries, today's 10 million Ashkenazi Jews can trace their ancestry to members of a population of only 350 individuals who lived about 600–800 years ago

"Endogamy" meaning marrying (and having offspring) within a small isolationist group.

Huh ... the example I used (Tay-Sachs) is an example of this. So I stand corrected. Thank you!

Thank god that the tech to sequence genomes was not available in the 1930s/1940s. Imagine what evil could be done with so much information.

> I can find a few sources if you want

Yes please. Thank you in advance!

> Jewish people (imho)

That was presented more as an impression than a data-based evaluation, but ok - it means HN has a little tolerance for para-intellectual bursts. :) (If all impressions were heartwarming, they would constitute less of a problem. They would probably not constitute a problem at all, if the mandate was clear that one's thoughts must duly be vetted.)

I got blocked from posting more in this thread. Will collect them in this comment if I can edit it. I don't deny most of these lists are probably tainted by national pride, and their contents might be partially fabrications.

I have tied to check them over the years and found some to be indeed true, but a good number of them evaded my google fu. Perhaps not that valuable sources, nevertheless:

https://magyarmegmaradasert.hu/in-english/our-language/1632-...

If you will be unable to post here, maybe you could collect some material, publish the best article on HN as a submission, and post the rest of the material in your comments there. We can check your submissions from your profile.

I've never heard anyone before making the claim that Hungarian in any way assists intellectual capacity.

I do believe there is something to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, but not to this degree. I know that, for example, Chinese students have a greater aptitude for basic arithmetic because in Chinese the sounds for the numbers are shorter and simpler than in most languages. This makes longer numbers easier to hold in short-term memory, assisting mental arithmetic. But... that's not going to churn out award-winning theoreticians!

I'm curious to know why anyone would make the claim that Hungarian is "that special" for intellectual thought. It's a bit of an odd duck of a language, sure. But not that special. To my knowledge the main beneficial property it has is that its structure makes it especially suitable for poetry. However, it shares that trait with Latin and I believe French also.

I’m not sure why you are downvoted.

I’m a native speaker and I did have a phase as a teenager when I thought that language must have to do something with intellect, mostly based on some nationalistic feeling. But I’m yet to find anything that would make it that special.

The only rare linguistic thing it has is double negation (we say I’ve never not eaten something instead of never eaten) - which might paradoxically help? (Due to people having to leave behind linguistic symbolism to properly do logical reasoning? But I’m entirely guessing here)

There was a study showing that bilingual people have a small but measurable advantage. Apparently, learning a second language helps lock in the concept that words are just arbitrary noises, accidents of history used as mere labels.

I regularly have debates with people speaking only English that conflate words with the meaning of the words. E.g.: they think that because a word or phrase has a certain root or structure, it implies something about the subject that it is describing.

For the same reason, being bilingual has a small positive effect for learning programming. It helps with the notion that variable names are just labels and it doesn't matter what specific sequence of letters they contain, the compiler doesn't care.

Obviously, none of this is special or unique to Hungarian. Knowing any two languages would have this effect...