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A growing cottage industry started in the late 1970s with the studies on the history of Hungarian luminaries in natural sciences. Apart from a number of publications in Hungarian, biographies of Leo Szilard, Michael Polanyi, John von Neumann, Theodore von Kármán, and Edward Teller appeared in the international knowledge market.1 Some Hungarian authors, publishing in English, attempted to give a full picture of these scientists’ life and works, starting with George Marx’s book and continued by the works of Tom Keve, Istvan Hargittai and Kati Marton.2They tried to uncover the “secret,” if it exists at all, of the scientific fertility of Hungarian culture in the period beginning sometime in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. These works, representing various genres and professional levels, often started from some visible success stories of Hungarian scientists, such as winning the Nobel prize or participating in important scientific projects, first of all in the Manhattan...

DOI: 10.1007/s11212-010-9112-0

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