Nobel Prize Winners of Hungarian Nationality and Descent
Nobel Prize Winners of Hungarian Nationality and Descent
The first time Nobel Prizes were awarded in Oslo and in Stockholm five years after the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor and industrial magnate. The prize was founded from his enormous private fortune in compliance with his last will and testament. It was not long before a scientist from Hungary won this prize which, to this day, is the most prestigious of all international prizes (and it also comes with the largest cash award). In 1905 during the traditional December 10 ceremony - Fülöp Lénárd (Philip Leonard) received the Nobel Prize for physics from the King of Sweden’s hands, ”for his research related to cathode rays”, the Swedish Academy of Sciences declared.
Lénárd was born in Pozsony, in those days still in Hungary (the city is now called Bratislava, and it is the capital of the Slovak Republic). His family was German. He attended a secondary school in Bratislava where instruction was given in Hungarian, and then he first attended the Technische Hochschule (Technical College) of Vienna, but later, disappointed with the Austrian college, he went over to Hungary to attend the University of Sciences in Budapest. From 1883 on he pursued his studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, where he graduated and obtained a Master of Sciences degree. After doing research in Budapest for a while he was so successful in his field that the Hungarian Academy of Sciences co-opted him among its correspondent members as early as in 1897. He remained in touch with the Hungarian scientific community almost until World War I: he wrote scientific publications in Hungarian and carried on his correspondence in Hungarian. He was a passionate anti-Semite and he stood by Hitler: five weeks after Hitler was sentenced to imprisonment on account of his „beer-hall putsch”, along with another Nobel Prize winning German physicist. Lénárd, then Professor at Heidelberg University, published an article glorifying Hitler in a Munich daily, and when the „Fuehrer” was released from prison, Lénárd, then 64, travelled to Munich to make his acquaintance. Although he retired in 1931, he remained a celebrity of the Nazi regime. 0n account of his political role, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences removed him from its members on 13 July, 1945.
The second Nobel Prize winner of Hungarian descent was Dr. Róbert Bárány, physician (1876 1936). The son of a Hungarian family living in Vienna, he graduated from the School of Medicine of the Austrian capital. As an intern at the famous Politzer teaching hospital, he realized the consequences of the malfunctions in the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear (this is the organ of balance) and summarized his findings in his major work published in 1907: the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, awarded him its prize for ”the most significant discovery in otology in the past 5 years”.
During World War I he worked in field army hospitals and was taken POW by the Russians. He contracted malaria in a POW camp near the Persian border. It was only after he had been transferred, as a result of mediation by the heir to the Swedish throne, to a POW camp in Europe that he learnt about the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1914 for his ”research related to the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus (organ of balance)”. Through the mediation of the Government of Sweden he was released from the POW camp in 1916. In 1926 he was appointed Professor at the University of Uppsala (Sweden), and later he worked in the institute established for him, based on his own plans until his relatively early death as a result of a disease contracted in the POW camp.
The third Hungarian Nobel Prize winner was Richárd Zsigmondy (1865-1929). He also came from a Hungarian family living in Vienna, he pursued his studies both in Vienna and in Germany: he had a Master of Sciences degree in organic chemistry. He worked at several universities. From 1900 he conducted research in his private laboratory in Jena and he was also employed by the famous Schott glass works of Jena, where he designed the ultramicroscope in 1903 and the ultra-filter in 1918. From 1907 he also became Professor at the prestigious University of Göttingen. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the year 1925, which he received in 1926.
He was succeeded by five Hungarian Nobel Prize winners, all of whom were born in Budapest, but only Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986), of all the Hungarian Nobel Prize winners, was living in Hungary when awarded the Nobel Prize, when he received his for medicine in 1937. Although his name is associated in public memory with the discovery of vitamin C only, his achievements are wider and more profound than that. Szent-Györgyi came from a wealthy family of land-owners, but on the distaff side he had famous scientists among his ancestors, such as the a Lenhossék’s, three professors at University of Budapest and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He received his diploma in medicine in 1917, and later was forced to find employment abroad because the University of Bratislava was dissolved. He worked in Hamburg, Berlin and Cambridge, where received his MSc degree in chemistry. He worked as a researcher in the Netherlands and in the United States as well. When requested by the then Minister of Culture, he returned to Hungary in 1930 and was given a Chair at the University of Szeged. A highly successful scientific workshop centred around him there. Among his scientific achievements was the discovery of hexuron acid, which proved to be vitamin C fits scientific name is ascorbic acid, and of vitamin P. During World War lI. he also undertook a secret diplomatic mission to get Hungary out of the Nazi alliance, but this mission failed. After the war he came to work at the University of Budapest and here he founded a new academy, but due to the political conditions of the day he did not return to Hungary from a trip abroad and settled in the United States and became Director of the Muscle Research Institute of the Naval Laboratory of Woods Hole.
The next Hungarian Nobel Prize winner was György Hevesy (1885-1966). He studied chemistry in Budapest, Berlin, Freiburg and later worked in Karlsruhe side by side with the Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber. From 1911 he worked in Manchester, together with Rutherford, also a Nobel Prize winner. It was at this latter place that he started to study radioactive materials. During World War l:. he did military service. After the war he was appointed Professor at the University of Budapest, later he worked in Denmark, in the Institute of the Nobel Prize winning Niels Bohr. After the German occupation of Denmark (1943) he moved to Stockholm. He was professor in Stockholm when in 1944 he was awarded the Nobel prize for 1943 for his research on isotopes.
Along with Albert Szent-Györgyi and Róbert Bárány he was the third Hungarian Nobel Prize winner who, in the Stockholm publications, declared himself to be Hungarian.
The next Hungarian Nobel Prize winner was György Békésy (1899-1972). The son of a Hungarian diplomat, he attended secondary schools in several countries, and received his diploma in physics after completing his university studies begun in Bern, Switzerland, in Budapest, where he obtained an MSc degree in physics in 1923. Between 1939 and 1946 he was Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Budapest. In 1946, when Hungary, devastated by the war, practically lay in ruins and the greatest inflation of modern history was raging in the country, and there was hardly any opportunity to conduct scientific research, he accepted a one-year scholarship for a research worker in Stockholm. In 1947, the famous elite university of the US, Harvard University, invited him to fill a teaching professor’s position and there he continued the physiological acoustic research he began in Budapest. It was in this way that he made his achievements, for which he, although a physicist, was awarded the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, „for the discovery of the physical mechanism of the stimuli generated in the cochlea of the ear”. At an advanced age, in 1966 - for the sake of more clement climatic conditions - he became Professor of the University of Hawaii and passed away in Honolulu. He left his valuable ari collection to the Alfred Nobel Foundation, where the artefacts are exhibited in a separate memorial room. An interesting side of his character was the fact that he insisted to the very end on the Hungarian spelling (totally incomprehensible for the American reader} of his surname, with an accent above the two „e”-s.
The seventh Nobel prize winner of Hungarian descent was Jenő P. Wigner (Eugene P. Wigner} who was born in Budapest in 1902 and died in Princeton, USA, in the early days of 1995. Although fascinated by physics, upon the request of his father - a well-to-da owner of a leather tannery - he graduated from the university as a chemical engineer. Subsequently he worked in his father’s factory for a while, then conducted research in Germany, and in 1930 he emigrated to the United States where he was Professor at Princeton University until his retirement in 1971 Besides his theoretical works in physics, he also took part in an undertaking that was to change the course of history: it was he who drove (Leó Szilárd) in his car to visit Albert Einstein, then on a fishing trip on the oceanfront and it was during this meeting that the letter addressed to President F.D. Roosevelt was written by them, which meant the beginning of research into the release of atomic energy. Wigner, along with the Nobel prize winning Italian immigrant Enrico Fermi played a decisive role in the construction of the first nuclear reactor installed in Chicago, and later he became Head of an important team, the Theoretical Physics Team of the research workers joining efforts to develop the A-bomb. For a short while after the war he worked as Director of R?D at the Oak Ridge Laboratory.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1961. After 1976, the scientist visited his birthplace, his home country, several times, where he was received with great many acknowledgements. (Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Doctor Honoris Causa, Professor Emeritus, etc.)
Dénes Gábor, or, better known as Dennis Gabor (1900-1979) was awarded the Nobel prize for physics as a British electrical engineer in 1971, ”For the discovery of and contribution to the development of, the holographic method.” He also started his university studies at the Budapest College of Technology, and graduated from the University of Berlin. In 1933/34 he worked as a research worker of the Tungsram Joint-Stock Company, and later he took up jobs at industrial research laboratories in England. In 1949 he became a University Professor. The significance of his research work was acknowledged world-wide: the Hungarian Academy of Sciences co-opted him as an Honorary Member as early as in 1964. His greatest and best known invention is the holographic method, the essence of which - to put it simply - is that photographs can be made that (when projected) provide a full, three-dimensional image, one can walk around these three dimensional images, just like one can walk around a physical object. This congenial idea became feasible when Laser beams were developed. The ”information- density” of the holograms is enormous - even any minute part of the hologram includes the total of the photographic information.
János Polányi (John C. Polanyi), the winner in 1986 of the Nobel Prize for chemistry was born in Berlin in 1929. The reason for his birthplace is the fact that his father, Mihály Polányi, member of one of the most famous Jewish families of the Hungarian intelligentsia; emigrated from Hungary after the downfall of the revolutions following World War I. (he was State Secretary for Health Care in the Government of the Republic of Hungary in 1918). Polányi the elder had significant achievements in Germany: it was in this country that his son, later to be awarded the Nobel prize, was born. After Hitler’s rose to power he fled to England and became Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Manchester. His son also graduated from that university. John C. Polanyi worked in Canada, for a short period in Princeton, then again in Canada, in Toronto. He published over 150 papers. He was awarded a number of highly prestigious scientific prizes which were unexpectedly crowned by the Nobel prize for ”research in the dynamics of elementary chemical processes”.
The next Hungarian Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel - who received the prize in the same year as Polanyi - is a personality with a surprising life story. He was born of a Hassidic Jewish family in Máramarossziget then belonging to Romania. ”I am of Hungarian and Romanian descent” he said about himself in a letter. He was given a traditional religious upbringing. He studied the ”worldly” sciences as a private student and took two exams in Hungarian in the Jewish Secondary Grammar Schools of Oradea and of Debrecen, but at the age of 15 he was deported. His parents and his sibling were killed in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After the liberation he went to Paris, where he soon learnt French and shortly he published novels, the first of which were prefaced by the Nobel prize winner Mauriac, an outspoken Catholic writer. He also wrote novels in Yiddish. He sent reports to Israeli papers in Hebrew, and later, during the Independence War he sent reports to French newspapers from Israel. Since 1956 he has been living in New York, and has been a guest lecturer at many an American universities. He has been a prolific writer. He published novels, studies extensively, and as the outstanding figure of the fight against anti-Semitism, he has received many awards which were crowned by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He, the writer, was not given a literary award, but the Peace Prize, ”because he is one of the most - important leading figures in times when violence, oppression and racial hatred left their mark on the face of the Earth” - as was expressed by the Nobel Committee.
Another chemist of Hungarian descent, György Oláh, was given the Nobel Prize in 1994. He was born in Budapest in 1927. As a student of the Grammar School of the Pious Order, the pedagogue of great renown József Öveges aroused his interest in natural sciences. He graduated from the University as a chemical engineer and his scientific career sky-rocketed immediately: at the early age of 27 he was Doctor of Chemical Sciences (bearers of this degree are eligible for membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and became Deputy Director of the Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He, along with his wife, who was also a fellow research worker, left Hungary after the Revolution of 1956. He found a job in a laboratory, involved in basic research, of the Dow Chemical giant concern, and although he had never before worked in the field of industrial research, soon he was promoted to one of the executive positions of the institute. And in 1964 the concern established a laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts and this is how György Oláh came to -work in the US. From there he first went to the University of Ohio, Cleveland, and later, in 1977 he became the Science Director of the Centre for Hydrocarbon Research of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He was the first scientist to succeed in detecting the basic carbon ions playing an important part in the elemental processes of hydrocarbon chemistry. The life cycle of these basic carbon ions is so short (one thousand millionth of a second) that their very existence was for a long time questioned. The achievements made by György Oláh are of great significance (cost-effective production of unleaded gasoline, etc). That the international scientific community recognized and acknowledged these achievements of his is proved, among many other things, by the fact that the Hungarian Academy of Sciences co-opted him an Honorary Member as early as in 1991.
In the same year when György Oláh was awarded the Nobel prize, another scientist of Hungarian descent, János Harsányi, was given the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics. Though this Prize was not founded by Alfred Nobel, the awarding, intellectual prestige and financial reward of the Nobel Memorial Prize is equal to that of the Nobel Prize. János Harsányi, born in Budapest in 1920, was given the prize in recognition of his research in game theory. Harsányi - since his parents owned a chemist’s shop - first graduated in pharmacology in Budapest. When he learnt in 1950 that private chemist’s shops would soon be nationalised he fled from the country across the swamps of Lake Fern (Neusiedler Lake across the border between Austria and Hungary). He then went to Australia, but his diploma was not accepted there. While earning a living through physical labor, he started studying at the School of Economics of Sydney. He was given a Rockefeller grant for his first papers, and in 1956 he went to the US to work with Nobel Prize winner, Professor Kenneth Arnold, and took up mathematical statistics upon encouragement from his mentor. Upon his return to Australia he was given a Chair at the University of Canberra, but in 1961 he went to the US for good. His research work further developed the game theory worked out by the Hungarian János Neumannn. (János Neumann, who, according to Jeni Wigner, also Einstein’s personal acquaintance, ”was the only genius I ever met”, was not awarded the Nobel Prize because he just ”did not fit” any of the disciplines, and there was no Nobel Memorial Prize for economics at that time.)
Certain reference books also consider the following Nobel Prize winners to be of Hungarian descent: Isidore Isaac Rabi, Nobel Prize for Physics, 1944 - he was born in Rymanov, Galitia, and went to the USA in his early childhood.
Milton Friedman: Nobel Prize for Economics 1976 - his parents emigrated to the US from Beregszász (Beregovo, Ukraine, formerly Hungary) Daniel Carleton Gajdusek - Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 1976 - his father, Slovak by nationality, emigrated from a small village near Nyitra and his maternal grandparents of Hungarian nationality emigrated to the US from Debrecen, Hungary and they settled in Yonkers, near New York City. He was born there in 1923.
