Science in Hungary [antikvár]

Scientific research in Hungary has traditions that command respect. In the last century a number of noteworthy scientists were active, mostly at university departments. Among them were Ányos Jedlik (1800-1895) who invented the dynamo, preceding Siemens by six years; János Bolyai (1802-1860), one of the discoverers of absolute geometry; Ignác Semmelweis (1818-1865), the discoverer of the means of preventing puerperal fever; Loránd Eötvös (1848-1919) whose torsion balance was the first physical instrument to be used in prospecting for oil, and whose very exact measurements in deter- mining the proportion of the inert and heavy mass were basic experiments to Einstein's general relativity theory; Sándor Körösi Csorna (1784-1842) and Ignác Goldziher (1850-1921), each engaged in pioneering research in a branch of oriental culture—the former in the language of Tibet and the latter in the culture of the Islam. They and many others contributed internationally acknowledged results to the development of science, but most of them were solitary figures who, although intellectual giants, received but little appre- ciation from contemporary society and had only few pupils to continue their work. It was only after the country's liberation from fascism in the late 1940s that science in Hungary attained the role and appreciation it deserves in an independent and rapidly developing country. Under the People's Democratic Government in Hungary industrial produc- tion rose 3.8 times from 1938, the last year of peace before the Second World War, to 1960, and the national income doubled between 1949 and 1959. A feasible long-range plan of the national economy has set a fourfold increase in the national income of 1960 by the year 1980. The political consolidation and the rise in living standards that are reflected in these figures and the great progress and extension of culture for everybody have made the active collaboration of science indispensable. A decade and a half ago research became an organic