The Martians of Budapest
“The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to — what appeared, from the perspective of Americans —to be a group of men with superhuman intellects, arriving from an obscure country and speaking an incomprehensible foreign language.
Scientists typically thought to belong to the group include refugees from the University of Göttingen, early associates of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and members of The Manhattan Project, including:
John von Neumann, Paul Erdős, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, Theodore von Kármán, Paul Halmos, George Polya, John Kemeny and John Hersányi.
John von Neumann (1903–1957): The polymath genius generally considered “the last representative of the great mathematicians”.He was a member of the Manhattan Project;
Paul Erdős (1913–1996): The eccentric, nomadic mathematician sometimes referred to as “the most prolific mathematician in history”.
Eugene Wigner (1902–1995): The 1963 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics lauded for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus.
Leó Szilárd (1898–1964): He conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 and in 1939 wrote the now famous Einstein-Szilárd letter which prompted the formation of what became the Manhattan Project.
Edward Teller (1908–2003): Colloquially known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb” and an early Manhattan Project member.
Theodore von Kármán (1881-1963): The aerospace engineer generally regarded as “the most outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century”.
John Hersányi (1920–2000): The 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize Laureate who made important early contributions to the study of games of incomplete information.
John G. Kemeny (1926–1992): Einstein’s assistant who later worked for Richard Feynman on the Manhattan project and invented the early programming language BASIC.
Paul Halmos (1916–2006): John von Neumann’s assistant who made fundamental contributions to logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory and functional analysis.
George Pólya (1887–1985): A first-rate mathematician who made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory;
The ten Martians from Budapest shared common ancestry, childhoods, cognitive abilities as well as similar education and career paths.
Martian Characteristics:
1. Jewish Ancestry - Although typically described as a property of being Hungarian in the early 20th century, the most prominent Martian characteristic may in fact be to be European and of Jewish ancestry. By the time of the First World War, Jews in Hungary were fairly well integrated into Hungarian society, having grown to constitute 5% of the country’s population and 23% of the population in its capital Budapest. Jews became especially prominent in science, the arts and business. In 1913, over 30% of the student body at the Budapest Universities of Sciences, Technology and Economics were of Jewish origin.
2. Unorthodox Childhoods - Many of the Martians describe a similar upbringing in Budapest:
a. All had educated and affluent working parents.
b. Homeschooling until the age of 10. All the Martians received excellent early education emphasizing both science, languages and literature.
3. Early entry to and graduation from university - von Neumann entered university at 18 and earned his Ph.D in mathematics at age 22. Erdős entered university at age 17 and earned his Ph.D at age 21. Halmos graduated with BA degrees in both mathematics and philosophy at age 19 and a Ph.D in mathematics at 22. Teller earned his Ph.D in physics by 22. Kemeny got a Ph.D in mathematics at the age of 23. Halmos entered the University of Chicago after completed a Ph.D at the age of 22. Pólya and Szilárd earned their Ph.Ds at 24 in mathematics and physics, respectively, while von Kármán earned his at age 27. Harsanyi earned two Ph.Ds, one in philosophy and sociology in and one in economics at Stanford University. He was 27 when he earned the first, having his studies interrupted by the second world war.
The Martians, in other words, grew up in affluent families with highly educated and/or successful parents who emphasized the value of education and hard work. The schooling system in Europe and America being as it was, enabled them to get an early start on their research careers. The Martians were growing up in fin de siècle Hungary. They benefited from the comfort of their well-to-do families, from the sophisticated atmosphere of Budapest, the liberal capital of a largely feudalistic Hungary, and from their excellent high schools.
4. Exceptional Cognitive Abilities - John von Neumann and Paul Erdős are especially remembered as uniquely gifted children. Both came to master mathematics early - the young von Neumann being able to divide two eight-digit numbers in his head by the age of six and the young Erdős calculating in his head how many seconds a person had been alive by the age of four. Von Neumann also dazzled teachers and other students from an early age by recalling entire novels by heart.
Von Neumann and Wigner shared the same high school math teacher in László Rátz (1863–1930) who in 1893 also founded a well known high school mathematics journal entitled Középiskolai Matematikai és Fizikai Lapok (KöMaL) in which both Pólya, Harsányi and Erdős later published. von Kárman (mathematics, 1897), Szilárd (physics, 1916), Teller (mathematics and physics, 1925) and Harsányi (mathematics, 1937) all won the prestigious Eötvös Prize for the “Best Student in Mathematics and Science in Hungary”.
5. Tenures at the University of Göttingen - Theodore von Kármán was the first Martian to travel to the “Mathematical Center of the Universe” at the University of Göttingen. Having graduated from the Budapest University of Technical and Economics in 1902, he moved there and earned his doctorate in 1908. Pólya too spent time in Göttingen, from 1912–13.
Von Neumann travelled to Göttingen in the fall of 1926 to work on logic. Wigner too was invited to work in Göttingen. While there, Wigner laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics. Edward Teller, a few years younger than von Neumann and Wigner, went to Göttingen in 1930 to study under Max Born.
By the time of the post-war period, following the Great Purge of 1933, the University of Göttingen had lost its stature as the “center of the mathematical universe” and so Kemeny, Halmos and Harsanyi’s post-doctoral periods were spent elsewhere.
6. Exodus to America - The first anti-Jewish law was enacted in Hungary in 1938, reversing the equal citizenship status granted to Jews in Hungary in 1867. Similar racial laws, inspired by German laws were also enacted in 1939 and ’41, specifically forbidding intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews and excluding Jews from many professions. By the time of the enactment of the laws, many of the Martians had already been working in Berlin and/or Göttingen for some time, and so experienced first-hand how life for those of Jewish ancestry would be under right-wing authoritarian rule. This prompted all the Martians to go to the USA.
Neumann said: "I expected World War II, and I was apprehensive that Hungary would be on the Nazi side, and I didn’t want to be caught dead on that side."
Many of the most popular anecdotes about the Martians of Budapest are collected in various works by György Marx:
Writing in an unorthodox structure, Marx’ work presents various word-of-mouth stories about the supposed existence of a group of extraterrestrials posing as Hungarians. One popular such anecdote goes:
The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars, likely to have planets circling around them. The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. Yearning for fresh worlds, they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth. - "And so," Fermi came to his overwhelming question, "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?" - It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox:"They are among us," he said, "but they call themselves Hungarians".Excerpt, Arrival of The Martians by György Marx (2000)
Von Kármán, Kemeny, von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner were born in the same quarter of Budapest. No wonder the scientists in Los Alamos accepted the idea that well over one thousand years ago a Martian spaceship crash-landed somewhere in the center of Europe. There are three firm proofs of the extraterrestrial origins of the Hungarians:
1. They like to wander about (like gypsies radiating out from the same region).
2. They speak an exceptionally simple and logical language which has not the slightest connection with the language of their neighbour.
3. And they are so much smarter than the terrestrials. It is so much easier to learn reading and writing in Hungarian than in English or French that Hungarian pupils have much more time left to study mathematics.
As Marx explains, “an obvious explanation of the myth of the Martians may be their strange language: its grammar and vocabulary are quite distinct from those of the Indo-European languages”.
Extraterrestrial Traces: The extraterrestrial origin of “the Hungarians” is proved by the fact that the names of Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann and Leó Szilárd cannot be found on the street map of Budapest, but there are craters named after them on the Moon!
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