| Book your hotel |
Famous hungarians
Famed painter known for his geometrical forms, he is the father of Op-Art.
He began as a medical student in Budapest before studying art (1928-9) at the "Budapest Bauhaus' (the Mühely Academy). He settled in Paris in 1930.
He pioneered the visually disturbing effects that were later called Op Art and began experimenting with the use of optical illusion during the 1930s, although the style of geometric abstraction for which he is best known dates from the late 1940s. His paintings were characterized by their repeated geometric forms and interacting vibrant colors which created a visually disorientating effect of movement. He also experimented with Kinetic Art.
His motto is "Art for all" and the Paris subway is full of his modern works.
Invention: Jet, Torpedoes
Dr. Albert Fonó was born and died in Budapest. He studied mechanical engineering at the József Technical University in Budapest and continued his studies abroad with a scholarship.
His theoretical work was many-sided, his main field was energetics.
His first invention - in 1915 - was an aerial torpedo which worked with jet propulsion and would have increased the effectiveness of artillery. Its significance was not recognized and understood by his time.
n 1923 he patented a new prototype of the gas boiler (furnace) and in 1928 an air compressor for mines.
His most important invention was a jet propulsion engine for supersonic aircrafts. After four years of preliminary examination, it was patented in Germany in 1932. With his invention he proved himself ahead of his time.
He became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954; from 1965 he was a corresponding member of the International Academy of Astronautics.
Legendary Boxer: First boxer in history to win 3 consecutive Olympic Gold Medals.
This magnificent boxer won three consecutive Olympic gold medals (1948, 1952 and 1956, beating Jose Torres in '56) eventually amassing an undefeated professional record of 27-0-2 and an incredible amateur record of 288-12. Though professional boxing was outlawed in Hungary, Papp nevertheless turned pro in 1957 and set up camp in Vienna.
Although 31 years old, Papp quickly made his mark felt on the middleweight division. Despite brittle bones in his hands, the southpaw Papp carried great power in his left hook. He scored two wins over Peter Mueller in 1961 and following a win over veteran Ralph "Tiger" Jones, Papp KO'd Chris Christensen to win the European middleweight title on May 16, 1962.
He successfully defended the title six times over the next three years and scored a non-title win over American Randy Sandy, who was a solid pro and former national amateur champion.
In 1965 Papp was on the verge of a world middleweight title shot when the communist Hungarian government revoked his permit to travel abroad, thus ending his pro career and denying him a chance at the world title. Papp later served as the coach of the Hungarian national boxing team from 1971-92.
Reniassance Master - perhaps the Greatest "German" artist of the Renaissance era. Also the most important of the Renaissance Mathematicians - Father of Descriptive Geometry.
Albrecht Durer was the third son of Albrecht Ajtos and Barbara Holfer. He was one of their eighteen children. The Ajtos family came from Hungary. The name Ajtos means "door" in Hungarian. When Albrecht Ajtos senior and his brothers came to Germany they chose the name Türer which sounds like the German "Tür" meaning door. The name changed to Dürer but Albrecht Dürer senior always signed himself Türer rather than Dürer.
Durer began his career in the Imperial Free City of Nürnberg with his father, a Hungarian goldsmith who had emigrated to Germany in 1455. Despite his goldsmith origins, however, by 1484 Durer had already begun painting. In 1486 he was apprenticed to the painter and printmaker Michael Wolgumut and began to work with woodcuts and copper engravings as well. His mastery of perspective came through his study of geometry and mathematical theories of proportion. Fascinated by mathematics, Durer traveled extensively. Durer began to explore the "mathematical secrets of art" and delved yet more deeply into the study of mathematics.
After returning to Nürnberg, Dürer's health became still worse. He did not slacken his work on either mathematics or painting but most of his effort went into his work Treatise on proportion. Durer expressed his theories on proportion in The Four Books on Human Proportions. Although it was completed in 1523, Dürer realised that it required mathematical knowledge which went well beyond what any reader could be expected to have, so he decided to write a more elementary text. He published this more elementary treatise, in four books, in 1525 publishing the work through his own publishing company.
This treatise, Unterweisung der Messung mit dem Zirkel und Richtscheit, is the first mathematics book published in German (if one discounts an earlier commercial arithmetic book) and places Dürer as one of the most important of the Renaissance mathematicians. Dürer's remarkable achievement was through applying mathematics to art, he developed such fundamentally new and important ideas within mathematics itself and gave rise to the field of "descriptive geometry."
Lehár, Franz (b. 4/30/1870 Komárom (now called Komarno in Slovakia after annexation at Trianon) - d. 10/24/1948, Bad Ischl, Austria)
Foremost composer of 20th century operettas.
Best known as a composer of operettas, he studied with his father, a military bandmaster, and at the age of 15, from 1882 to 1888 he was a pupil at the Prague Conservatory, studying violin and music theory. On the advice of Dvorak, he concentrated on composition.
After graduation, he played violin in the opera orchestra at Elberfeld. Later, he joined his father's band, the Fiftieth Infantry, in Vienna, as assistant bandmaster. In Vienna, he also free-lanced as a conductor, and in the Spring of 1902, became conductor at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. His opera Wiener Frauen was produced there in November, 1902. From that time, he lived in Vienna, and devoted his time to composition.
�The man in the street may love The Merry Widow,� observed Ernest Newman, �but the musician, in addition to loving it, admires and wonders at it, so fresh and varied is the melodic invention in it, so deft, for all their economy, the harmonization and the scoring.�
Franz Lehar wrote nearly forty operettas. His greatest success was The Merry Widow, which was first produced at Theater an der Wien on December 30, 1905. which had more than five thousand performances. At one time, it ran simultaneously in five different languages in five different theaters, all in Buenos Aires. Other major successes include The Count of Luxemburg (1911) and Land of Smiles (1923), Gypsy Love, Eva and other sonatas, symphonic poems, marches, and dances.
In February 1935 Lehár decided to found his own publishing house in order to have the greatest possible control over the performance and availability of his works. He incorporated Glocken Verlag Vienna on 15 February 1935. He reacquired most of his oeuvre from other publishers to whom he had previously sold various rights and devoted much time to the publication of definitive editions. He died in Bad Ischl on 24 October 1948.
Invention: Gravitational torsion balance, Law of capillarity
The University of Science in Budapest was named after Baron Lóránd Eötvös.
Dr. Baron Loránd Eötvös, physicist, professor, minister of education, was born in Buda and died in Budapest. He completed his education in Heidelberg, Germany.
The Torsion or Eötvös balance, designed by Baron Eötvös, is a sensitive instrument for measuring the density of underlying rock strata. The device measures not only the direction of force of gravity, but the change in the force of gravity's extent in horizontal plane. It determines the distribution of masses in the earth's crust. The Eötvös torsion balance, an important instrument of geodesy and geophysics throughout the whole world, studies the Earth's physical properties. It is used for mine exploration, and also in the search for minerals, such as oil, coal and ores.
Eötvös' law of capillarity served as a basis for Einstein's theory of relativity.
(Capillarity: the property or exertion of capillary attraction of repulsion, a force that is the resultant of adhesion, cohesion, and surface tension in liquids which are in contact with solids, causing the liquid surface to rise - or be depressed...)
(b. Feb 11, 1898, Budapest, d. May 30, 1964, La Jolla, California)
Physicist - Co-developed the Atomic Bomb, patented the nuclear reactor, catalyst of the Manhattan Project: Conceived the nuclear chain reaction and campaigned for nuclear disarmament, though the first to consider the application of the atom to making bombs. Achieved first sustained nuclear fission reaction with Enrico Fermi. Identified the unit or "bit" of information.
Szilard first realized the potential use of nuclear fission in an atomic bomb, and worked with Fermi on the first nuclear reaction. Seen here with Albert Einstein, his other ideas included the electron microscope, cyclotron, and linear accelerator. As an inventor, he even has numerous joint patents with Einstein. He proposed term "breeder" to describe an nuclear reactor and holds a joint 1955 US patent on the nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi.
In 1960, after a personal meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, during Khrushchev's visit to New York, he proposed methods of reducing US-USSR tensions, including the Washington-Moscow "hotline." Shared Atoms for Peace Award with Eugene Wigner and devoted much of his life toward nuclear disarmament and preventing the harmful use of nuclear energy.
With Wigner, he convinced Einstein, the scientific community, and the President to start the Manhattan Project. Albert Einstein's 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging development of an atomic bomb - the famous document that started the Nuclear Age - was not written by Einstein at all.
It was ghostwritten for him by Szilard. In 1939, Szilard and Princeton scientist Eugene Wigner approached Einstein to ask a vital favor: Given his great stature, would he lend his name to the promotion of a serious study of nuclear energy's wartime applications and the design and construction of an atomic bomb? Einstein agreed, although he confessed relative ignorance about nuclear chain reactions.
Szilárd wrote a draft and presented it to him for his signature on Aug. 2. It spoke of the "vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements [that] would be generated" by a nuclear chain reaction set off in a large chunk of uranium. The message finally went to Roosevelt.
Later Einstein did write and sign two follow-up messages which, together with the first, led to the 1942 formation of the Manhattan Project, - which developed the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Szilárd was one of the project's guiding forces; Einstein had nothing whatsoever to do with it and wrote:
"I ... only acted as a mailbox," Einstein later wrote. "They [Szilard and Wigner] brought me a finished letter, and I simply mailed it."
Ferenc Erkel (Hungarian pronunciation: November 7, 1810]] – June 15, 1893) was a Hungarian composer. He was the father of Hungarian grand opera, written mainly on historical themes, which are still often performed in Hungary. He also composed the music of "Himnusz", the national anthem of Hungary, which was adopted in 1844.
The libretti of his first four operas were written by Béni Egressy. Beside the operas, which he is the best known for, he wrote pieces for piano and chorus. He headed the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra (founded in 1853). He was also the director and piano teacher of the Hungarian Academy of Music until 1886. The Hungarian State Opera House in Budapest was opened in 1884, of which he was the musical director.
Erkel was born in Gyula. In 1839, he married Adél Adler, they had four sons - Gyula (July 4, 1842 Pest - March 22, 1909 Újpest), Elek (November 2, 1843 Pest - June 10, 1893 Budapest), László (April 9, 1844 Pest - December 3, 1896 Pozsony) and Sándor (January 2, 1846 Pest - October 14, 1900 Békéscsaba) - who participated in the composing of his later operas.
Erkel was an internationally acknowledged chess player as well. He died in Budapest.
A department of the Opera House was established in 1911 in Budapest which also performs operas, named Erkel Színház (Erkel Theatre) since 1953.
Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945) http://www.bartok.hu
A cosmopolitan of music
A world-famous innovator of classical music: his opera, Bluebeard's Castle and his theatre pieces, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin are on the repertoire of all noted opera houses in the world.
In the early 20th century he was collecting folk music of Hungarians and other ethnics together with Zoltán Kodály, and he later used these motives in his famous chorus and orchestra pieces.
He emigrated to the United States in 1940, where he wrote one of his most popular works, the Concerto.
Albert Szent-Györgyi
Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt (September 16, 1893 – October 22, 1986) was a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with discovering vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. He was also active in the Hungarian Resistance during World War II and entered Hungarian politics after the war.
Miklós Rózsa http://www.comcen.com.au
Triple Oscar Winning Film Composer
Miklos Rozsa was born in Budapest in 1907 and from an early age demonstrated his mother's same affinity for music. He learned the violin, the viola and the piano and was publicly performing Mozart at the age of 7. A musical career awaited, and he was inspired by Bartok and Liszt among others, and shared their liking for folk music.
While his parents tried to steer him towards a more practical lifestyle, insisting he major in chemistry at the University of Leipzig, it wasn't long before he was enrolled in Leipzig Conservatory, training in musicology, preparing him for a long, successful and influential career in music.
He began scoring films for fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda in England in the 1930s and went with him to Hollywood to make The Thief of Bagdad (1940). Rózsa's work ranges from the The Jungle Book (1942) to the intimate, disturbing accompaniment for Spellbound (1945) to the epic, scores of Julius Caesar (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) and El Cid (1961). For twenty years, from 1945 to 1965, he was a professor at the University of Southern California, teaching and continuing to compose classical works.
It was Rosza who began the vogue for recorded film scores, and he remained the most recorded of film composers for at least 40 years.
Nicolas Sarkozy http://www.sarkozynicolas.com
French Prime Minister
Sarkozy often mentions his heritage. His father is Pal Nagy y Sarkozy, an aristocrat who fled Hungary in 1944 and acquired French citizenship. Pal always considered himself Hungarian and, as a result, Nicolas speaks the mother tongue fluently.
Everyone in France is sure that Sarkozy will one day become president. A graduate in public law and political science, Nicolas Sarkozy is a barrister by profession. In 1987, he was responsible at the Ministry of the Interior for action to combat chemical and radiological risks.
He has become a very popular figure nicknamed "Sarko." Since coming to office, Mr Sarkozy has put more policemen on the streets than ever before, cracked down on drugs, crime and terrorism, and two thirds of the voters say they think he is great. This former Chirac Protege may soon vie for France's highest office.
Nicolas Sarkozy entered politics in 1977, at the age of 21, when he was elected mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine as a member of the RPR's Central Committee. He was National delegate for young RPR party members from 1978 to 1979, and then became chairman of the national committee for young people supporting Jacques Chirac in the 1981 presidential election. He became a member of the Ile-de-France Regional Council from 1983 to 1988, and then member of the executive bureau and Vice-Chairman of the Hauts-de-Seine General Council (1985-1988). He was elected National Assembly Deputy for Hauts-de-Seine for the first time in 1988, re-elected in 1993, 1995 and again in 1997 when he became a member of the National Assembly finance committee. Sarkozy sat as an MEP (Union for Europe) from July to September 1999. He gave up his seat as an MEP to Brice Portefeux, Chairman of the Rassemblement pour la République's (RPR) Hauts-de-Seine Department Committee. Sarkozy became Minister for the Budget in 1993 and was Government Spokesman from March 1993 until July 1994. He was also acting Minister of Communication in the Balladur Government from January to April 1995. He has been a member of the RPR's political bureau since 1995, and is its Spokesman. As Secretary-General from 1998-1999, he was also its acting chairman. He is divorced, from his first marriage he's got two children.
Physicist, instrumental in the Manhattan Project, Father of the the H-Bomb: co-developed the Atomic Bomb and Discovered BET equation.
Edward Teller is most widely known for his significant contributions to the first demonstration of thermonuclear energy; in addition he has added to the knowledge of quantum theory, molecular physics, and astrophysics.
Young Edward was a mathematical prodigy. In 1926, Edward left Budapest to study chemical engineering in Karlsruhe, Germany. In Karlsruhe, Teller became intrigued by physics, particularly the new theory of quantum mechanics.
After recovering from teh loss of his foot in a streetcar accident, he learned to walk with a prosthesis, and transferred to the University of Leipzig, to study with Werner Heisenberg, who was in the forefront of the new physics. Teller received his doctorate in physics in 1930 and took a job as research consultant at the University of Gottingen. His first published paper: "Hydrogen Molecular Ion," was one of the earliest statements of what is still the most widely held view of the molecule. Edward Teller made a major contribution to the development of the atomic bomb. Teller's friend Leo Szilárd enlisted Albert Einstein to bring this danger to the attention of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt appealed to the scientific community to mobilize for the defense of freedom. In 1941 Teller joined America's best physicists in the top secret Manhattan Project. Their mission: to develop the atom bomb before the Germans did. From the beginning, some scientists had feared that an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, like that of the proposed bomb, might continue indefinitely, consuming the earth. Teller's calculations reassured the team that the nuclear explosion, while enormously powerful, would only destroy a limited area.
Seen here with President Kennedy accepting the National Medal of Science, Edward Teller managed Los Alamos research on the "Super," as he called the hydrogen bomb. Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and the end of World War II slowed "Super" research.
Teller, a strong anti-Communist and sensitive to U.S. and Soviet relations, pushed unsuccessfully to accelerate work on a super-bomb. He was frustrated by the post-war direction of Los Alamos. He accepted a University of Chicago professorship and left Los Alamos in October 1945. In April 1946, Teller returned to Los Alamos and led a secret conference on the "Super." The conference reviewed his earlier work on fusion, which led to his full-time return to Los Alamos in 1949 to continue research on the hydrogen bomb.
On January 31, 1950, President Truman approved hydrogen bomb development and testing, partly as a result of the first Soviet atomic test the previous August. Since 1975, Edward Teller has been senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute for the Study of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He is also Director Emeritus at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
