= World War II history fascinates me. Especially, discussions of the scientists behind it. VonNeumann, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Teller, and Oppenheimer.
Quote:
George Pólya and the Heuristic Tradition
Fascination with Genius in Central Europe
by Tibor Frank
....
Despire what we know about the social conditions which nurtured and even forced out the talent of these many extraordinary scientists, how this occured still remains somewhat mysterious. Stanislaw Ulam recorded an interesting quote from John von Neumann when describing their 1938 journey to Hungary in his Advdentures of a Mathematician.
I returned to Poland by train from Lillafüred, traveling through the Carpathian foothills. ... This whole region on both sides of the Carpathian Mountains, which was part of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, was the home of many Jews. Johnny [von Neumann] used to say that all the famous Jewish scientists, artists, and writers who emigrated from Hungary around the time of the first World War came, either directly or indirectly, from these little Carpathian communities, moving up to Budapest as their material conditions improved. The [Nobel Laureate] physicist I[sidor] I[saac] Rabi[25] was born in that region and brought to America as an infant. Johnny used to say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or else face extinction[26].
An interesting fact about Jewish-Hungarian geniuses at the turn of the century was that several of them could multiply huge numbers in their head. This was true of von Kármán, von Neumann and Edward Teller. Von Neumann, in particular commanded extraordinary mathematical abilities. Nevertheless, there is no means available to prove that this prodigious biological potential was more present in Hungary at the turn of the century than elsewhere in Europe[27].
Unquote:
Glen
