The social construction of Hungarian genius

Hungary is a most intriguing country. Among the many mysteries that surround Magyarország, the Magyar language is one of the most fascinating. Hungarian history, albeit occasionally tragic, is also quite interesting. In particular, how was it possible for Hungary to spawn so many brilliant intellectuals and artists during the (relatively) short life of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy (1867-1918)?

In The Social Construction of Hungarian Genius [1], Tibor Frank attempts to answer this question by providing “a broader background — historical, social, intellectual, and cultural — to understanding the admirable creativity in early 20th century Hungary, with the mathematician and scientist John von Neumann (1903-1957) in center focus”. Frank argues that the social and cultural transformations that Hungary went through after the Compromise of 1867, among which:

• the decline of feudalism and the emergence of a middle-class.

• the assimilation of Jews and ethnic Germans in Hungarian society (a process he calls “Magyarization”).

• the influence of German culture in Hungarian mathematics, science, music, and education system.

created the conditions for a new intellectual elite to emerge. The leadership of József Eötvös and his son Loránd Eötvös, the excellence of high-school teachers such as László Rátz and Sándor Mikola, the foundation of the Középiskolai Matematikai Lapok by Dániel Arany, and the establishment of the Eötvös Competition led to the discovery, nurturing, and training of exceptional students such as von Neumann, von Kármán, Wigner, Szilárd, Teller, among many others.

In 1918, with the end of World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Hungary underwent a period of political turmoil that forced some of its intellectual elite to exile, first in Germany, and later in the United States. Frank’s book [2] focuses on such migrations.

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References

[1] Tibor Frank, The Social Construction of Hungarian Genius (1867-1930), background paper for the panel Discussion “Budapest: The Golden Years” in “The von Neumann Memorial Lectures”, Princeton, 2007.

[2] Tibor Frank, Double Exile: migrations of Jewish-Hungarian professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919-1945, Peter Lang, 2009.

American SIGINT in Indochina (1945-1975)

In January 2008, four decades after the famous Tet Offensive, the secretive National Security Agency (NSA) declassified the 500-page report Spartans in Darkness [1], a most fascinating study on the U.S. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) operations in Indochina, from the Japanese surrender in 1945 until the fall of Saigon in 1975.

The most interesting part of the report is, in my opinion, chapter 5 [pdf], on the highly controversial Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The author of the report, Robert J. Hanyok, shows that, contrary to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara‘s assertions at the time, there was no attack on U.S. ships on August 4, 1964.

[ USS Maddox in 1964 - photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy ]

Note, however, that on August 2, 1964 the USS Maddox was engaged by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. In other words, the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident”, in fact, consisted of two separate incidents. An alternative version of chapter 5 is Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish [2], released by the NSA in 2005 under the FOIA.

Also quite interesting is the study of the enemy’s Communications Intelligence (COMINT) operations in chapter 8 [pdf]. Not surprisingly, the enemy monitored (and jammed) U.S. radio communications. However, the revelation that the enemy did manage to create blue-on-blue situations by penetrating the U.S. radio communications and calling U.S. artillery / air strikes on U.S. ground units is somewhat shocking.

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References:

[1] Robert J. Hanyok, Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975, Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002.

[2] Robert J. Hanyok, Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: the Gulf of Tonkin mystery, 2–4 August 1964 [pdf], Cryptologic Quarterly, Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2001.

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Related:

• The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 years later: flawed intelligence and the decision for war in Vietnam (2004)

• Newly declassified NSA documents show analysts made “SIGINT fit the claim” of North Vietnamese attack (2005)

• Vietnam war intelligence ‘deliberately skewed,’ secret study says (2005)

• National Security Agency releases history of American SIGINT and the Vietnam War (2008)

• Declassified study puts Vietnam events in new light (2008)

• Records show doubts on ’64 Vietnam crisis (2010)

Dangerous Knowledge

Bring vor, was wahr ist.
Schreib so, dass es klar ist.
Und verficht’s, bis es mit dir gar ist.

– Ludwig Boltzmann

Dangerous Knowledge is a 90-minute long BBC documentary about the lives of four great thinkers: Georg Cantor (1845-1918), Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), and Alan Turing (1912-1954). Cantor founded Set Theory, Boltzmann founded Statistical Mechanics, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems had an immense impact on Mathematical Logic, and Turing was one of the fathers of Computer Science. Why these four scientists? What is the pattern? The answer is that all four of them committed suicide.

The documentary is a bit too sensationalist for my taste. Its message is that these four brilliant minds were driven to madness (and, ultimately, to suicide) due to the earth-shattering nature of their ideas. While one could argue that such a claim is not too far-fetched in the cases of Cantor and Boltzmann, it seems somewhat distasteful when applied to Turing. Turing did not go insane because of the depth of his revolutionary insights. Turing’s homosexuality was viewed as a security problem during the troubled times of the Cold War, and the brutal punishment which he underwent (chemical castration) was probably what led him to take his life. Gödel feared that someone was poisoning his food, and would refuse to eat unless his wife would taste his food first. When his wife was hospitalized for some time, Gödel starved himself to death. Hence, the claim that these four suicides were due to “dangerous knowledge” seems rather crude to me.

On the bright side, the claim that these four geniuses were ahead of their time sounds rather plausible. Cantor’s or Boltzmann’s ideas did not meet fierce resistance because they were technically wrong, but because they challenged the belief that the universe was perfect and orderly. No one wanted to hear about Boltzmann’s work on entropy, because entropy is, by definition, a measure of disorder. As Hilbert’s program tried to fix the inconsistencies in  the foundations of Mathematics, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems made Hilbert’s monumental mission “wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen” seem even harder to accomplish.

In my most humble opinion the times were not yet ripe for theories that imposed limitations on human knowledge. “What about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?”, I hear you ask. Good point. Do note that two decades can make a world of difference. Heisenberg’s work was created when Quantum Mechanics was already out of the box. By contrast, Boltzmann had to fight the 19th Century establishment that was still deeply entrenched in the Newtonian paradigm.

If you have a couple of hours, here are the documentary’s videos:

[ part 1 | part 2]

Greg Chaitin and Sir Roger Penrose are included in this documentary, which itself makes it worth watching.

The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer

In the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took an action, hardly did anything that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong. My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent.

– J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)

The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a two-hour documentary film on the life of the brilliant and charismatic American nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), from his youth and emergence as one of America’s leading physicists, to his leadership of the Manhattan Project, and his most tragic humiliation during the anti-Communist witch-hunt in the 1950s.

The film was produced by David Grubin, and it features actor David Strathairn as Oppenheimer. You can watch it online for free. The transcript is also available.