A visit to Hungarian mathematics

Abstract

Our investigation focused on historical, pedagogical, and social-political aspects of Hungarian mathematical life. We did not attempt to survey Hungarian mathematical research of the present. Even so, our time proved too short for our ambitions. The important Hungarian mathematicians whom we missed are certainly more numerous than those we interviewed. We spoke in depth to a dozen people, and carried out formal interviews with eight: in Hungary, Belaszokefalvi-Nagy, Pal Erdos, Tibor Gallai (recently deceased), Istvan Vincze, and Lajos Posa; in the United States, Agnes Berger, John Horvath, and Peter Lax. (While we were in Budapest, two of the leading newspapers carried major articles honoring Szokefalvi - Nagy's 75th birthday.) We asked all our interviewees the question “What is so special about Hungarian mathematics? What made possible the production of so many famous mathematicians in such a small, poor country, in the period between the two Wars?” In our interviews, and also in our reading, we got two quite distinct kinds of answers. Type 1 was internal. It related to institutions and practices within the world of mathematics. The other kind, type 2, was external. It related to trends and conditions in Hungarian history and social life at large. Perhaps one contribution of this article is to point out the importance of both types of answer. One could conjecture that favorable conditions of both types---within mathematical life and within socio-politico-economic life at large--- are necessary to produce a brilliant result such as the Hungarian mathematics of the 1920s and 1930s. In the terminology used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick Robinson [5] in their study of creativity, perhaps conditions have to be right both in the "domain"---the area of creative work and in the "field"---the ambient culture.