Since the article discusses the origin of the term, Richard Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb writes:

> Otto Frisch remembers that his friend Fritz Houtermans [..] proposed the popular theory that "these people were really visitors from Mars"

His Wikipedia article goes into more details:

> Houtermans had a great sense of humor. Many have commented on this, and one of his colleagues, Haro von Buttlar, collected stories told by Houtermans and privately published them in a book with more than 40 pages. One story purports to explain the contributions of seven of the twentieth century's most exceptional scientists, Theodore von Kármán, George de Hevesy, Michael Polanyi, Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller, all Hungarians. According to Houtermans, they are Martians, who are afraid that their accents will give them away, so they masquerade as Hungarians, i.e., people unable to speak any language but Hungarian without an accent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Houtermans#Personal

They were all Jewish. Jews are over-represented in Physics Nobel prize laureats, not just Hungarian Jews.

Possibly a double whammy effect of been Hungarian and Jewish.

My partner is Hungarian and they put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board that we (in the UK or at least my part of it) don't.

Outside of the upper middle-class and above there is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in England (I can't speak for the other member countries of the UK) and certainly the case in the working class schools I was educated in, you'd get bullied for been the class swot basically.

> My partner is Hungarian and they put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board that we (in the UK or at least my part of it) don't.

I wonder if this is an Austro-Hungary effect or a central Europe thing. Every country I know of that follows the German education system is considered to “put an emphasis on rigorous education across the board”.

Whenever we compare notes from my Slovenian schooling with American friends it seems like the US education system is a joke by comparison.

Although in official rankings we score lower so who knows. Maybe I just got lucky

I believe this is the average experience of most in Europe, I am Italian and I find the US (lower) education system worse than the Italian one too, and we score _terribly_ in all international rankings.

I believe it's probably a different distribution: european education is maybe flattened around the average, while in the US there is possibly a wider distribution.

It's called the prussian school model, focuses heavily on memorizing and lexical knowledge. But is very poor on teamwork and preparing you for real life. Prussian (German) society needed reliable factory workers so that's why school starts so early (7:30-8:00 AM) to pretty much condition children to get up early, be obedient and just focus on the job.

Germany at least has a parallel system of industrial apprenticeships and guilds which is a global success story.

I’m sorry but as a Hungarian, this is laughable.

Any positive we had at a time comes from socialism’s general focus on education (one of the few positives of it) - eg. both Russian and Hungarian math education went up to differentiation/integration by the end of secondary school. It also had very extensive programs for talented students.

Unfortunately, currently we have seriously laughable pay for teachers (barely above the seriously laughable minimal pay), so we have a bunch of burnt out, old teacher with no motivation.

>Any positive we had at a time comes from socialism’s general focus on education (one of the few positives of it)

If we're still talking about "the martians" here, don't they predate the socialist control of Hungary by at least a decade?

Yes. But the Austro-Hungarians had famously good (for the time) schools all over the empire.

I don't know if this is common to all the Martians, but John von Neumann was home-schooled by private tutors/governesses until the age of ~10. No doubt he had a broad spectrum of intellectual talents, but his early development at least was based on a one-to-one pastoral footing, not a mass-education school system.

This is how education was traditionally done. If you can at all afford it, take your kid out of the public school system and either home school or find a good private school. In the age of the internet with so many learning materials online and the possibility of zoom tutoring by subject matter experts, it's never been easier to get a fantastic education.

The UK upper class is remarkably educated and unintelligent in my opinion. You meet lots of people in the UK in some strata of society who went to Oxford yet have never really been taught how to think.

UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.

This is a big problem in America as well, especially pronounced in certain subcultures.

More discussion about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

Noticeably long lifespans. I realize it's hard to quantify this but just eyeballing it, for a group of 10 people who got famous before age 50, born that far back, to have four members break 90 seems unusual - including wartime or other disease-related deaths.

The fact that IQ tests can predict longevity is interesting.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC30556/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothian_birth-cohort_studies

John von Neumann=54, Paul Erdős=83, Eugene Wigner=93, Leó Szilárd=66, Edward Teller=95, Theodore von Kármán=82, John Hersányi=80, John G. Kemeny=66, Paul Halmos=90, George Pólya=98

Does that control for income? I'd imagine a good bit would be explained by that.

I'd imagine the main thing is genetics and way of living. One of my grandpas lived to almost 100 and he's always been poor. Very, very poor

I think "some" poverty for people born in the first half of the 20th century is correlated with long life spans.

People didn't eat much and had healthier food (more veggies because those were cheaper), spent a lot of time outdoors or doing physical work. They got the good stuff of the "olden times", but still reaped a lot of the benefits of modern medicine especially in their late years.

I am worried my generation won't live as long as my grandparents' on average.

> am worried my generation won't live as long as my grandparents' on average.

I worry more that my generation will work longer in order to have a drawn out period of ill health before death.

I want to maximise Quality Adjusted Life Years. I am as yet unsure on how to compare a working year to a retired one in that metric.

eg. Work to 60, retire, die at 75 after a short illness sounds far better to me than work to 70, die at 90 after 10 years of illness and being in care.

Maybe come age 60 I will have a different view!

Kind of shocking this has been downvoted. I guess it is finally daytime in the US...

These kinds of threads always go downhill around that time

That's a pretty prejudiced thing to say

No offense intended, I'm an Eastern European who has lived in the US for almost 3 decades now, and as prejudiced as it may sound, most Americans don't deal well with accepting reality that conflicts their own internal worldview. It's almost as if a big chunk of Americans haven't been taught conflict, disagreement, or a minimal tolerance of an opposing viewpoint.

I'm American. What you say isn't wrong for most people I know. I don't know too many non-Americans well enough to say if it expands past our little country.

Sadly, it has been my experience

I remember mine eating raw pig fat (home made) straight out of the jar. Just fat with a little bit of bread. That was back in the early 90s when "fat" was considered an enemy and my relatives would jump on him for doing so.

So yeah. Income might be a good indicator for health in some parts of the world. But the irony of poor people having better health than the rich is not lost on me. They just couldn't afford the "good stuff" from the market

It's incredible both our posts have been downvoted. I am struggling to understand what's so offending about what we've said.

This is absolutely correct. For hundreds of years the poor "peasants" have eaten healthier than royalty. Pretty sure there's a research paper floating somewhere around HN about it (Victorians and their health). I grew up on and still eat rendered fat and crackling sandwiches, because a) crazy delicious, and b) crazy healthy (pig lard is by far all-around healthiest fat). My grandma raised pigs, chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, etc. We grew up in Eastern Europe, we ate meat on a regular basis (several times a week) as well as everything else that we grew or that grew in the wild around us. She lived through both world wars and lived to be 99.

IQ predicts income too.

n: 10, sum: 807, min: 54, max: 98, mean: 80.700000, median: 82.5, sd: 14.507086

Hungarian perspective here:

I believe there are a couple of factors at play here.

First of all, most (perhaps all) of those people are Hungarian Jews, and Jewish people (imho) are both very intelligent and their culture values education a lot. Hungary had a very large Jewish population at the time, so no wonder we produced so many great scientists!

Second is the Hungarian language. Ede Teller specifically said his scientific achievements are thanks to the Hungarian language, and without it he could only be a high school teacher. I can find a few sources if you want, and the ones I know about might not be accurate, but for example Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who spoke 58 languages himself, said of our language: “Do you know which language, because of its constructive ability and the harmony of its rhythm, comes before all the others? The Hungarian! It seems as if the Hungarians themselves do not know the treasure of their language…”.

Third Hungary at that point was a rather developed country, unlike now. Budapest metro opened after the London one, as the worlds' second.

Edit: Fourth, not related to the previous 3 as not unique to Hungary, but there were probably "network effects" at play. Science does not happen in a vacuum, as Paul Erdos said for him maths is a social activity (as witnessed by his vagabond tendency to move in with his peers and work on problems while living at their house). So probably having all these great minds in related fields was a kind of a feedback loop.

It seems you're discriminating positively. The Jewish population in Hungary was very large at the time. Many of them were just farmers. Some of them were doctors and engineers and business-men. Those exceptional mathematicians were indeed an exception. This is not to negatively discriminate. Believing that an ethnicity has super-powers or super-flaws is a bias. You notice all the exceptions and don't notice all the other average samples that don't confirm your hypothesis. Also small sample of populations are just more likely to have extreme values. This is more because of the narrow sample.

Finally on the language part, great scientists flew nazi countries from all over Europe. Only some of them were Hungarian-speaking. Enrico Fermi was from Rome, from a not particularly religious Catholic family. Enrico Fermi went to the US for better opportunities AND to protect his wife Laura whom was Jewish.

> whom was Jewish.

Biased sample indeed. The brilliant scientists who had no reason to flee didn’t and it’s not surprising the reasons to flee are over represented in a sample taken from those who did.

I also suspect a lot of Jewish Hungarians who fled were not brilliant scientists, just rich or talented enough to afford escaping.

No, you misunderstand. In 80 years before or since, these dozen or so ethnically Jewish scientists were literally the only world-leading Hungarian scientists. (Maybe I would add Eotvos and Szenty-Gyorgyi, but that’s about it…)

Given that only 5% of the pre-WW2 population of Hungary was Jewish, the fact that 80% of geniuses were of Jewish parentage is highly unusual, emigration or not.

It's interesting that Hungarian is one of the few Uralic languages in modern Europe, alongside Finnish and Estonian as the other 2 major representatives. Finland and Estonian could be argued to have enjoyed outsized success in STEM fields as well. I wonder if there could be value in learning languages with divergent roots. Most Europeans learn multiple languages, but typically they have similar roots (Indo-European) and a fair amount of crossover.

There is some evidence for the weak form of linguistic relativity, the idea that language can have significant impact on cognition. Perhaps taken to the extreme, with learning many varied and highly divergent languages at a young age, it can explain some of e.g. von Neumann's brilliance.

There is a fringe theory, that agglutinative languages with consistent vocabulary are more effortless for children to learn. So children would spend less time learning and memorizing words, and could proceed faster to learn other things.

English vocabulary is a patchwork with origins from several different languages, so words with related meaning can look different. Whereas for example Finnish is consistent:

    kirjoittaa – to write
    kirjailija – writer
    kirja – book
    kirje – letter
    kirjasto – library
    kirjallisuus – literature
    kirjasin – font

In this way, you can learn the same vocabulary by learning maybe 5x smaller amount of root words.

http://finnish-and-pisa.blogspot.com/

I learned to read and write Hungarian in a matter of weeks. It is spelled phonetically, with only a handful of special cases. It's hilariously easy.

English is a random mish-mash of at least four languages, making it seem very random and ad-hoc. However, it mercifully uses the latin alphabet. Chinese is just a nightmare, with students spending most of their schooling just to become literate...

Which resources did you use to learn to rw Hungarian so fast?

I learned in the first few weeks of primary school. Most students achieved literacy in the same time frame, a few months at most for the slower kids.

My son, to everybody’s surprise, learned my(father) native language (Hungarian) much better than his mother’s native language (Ukrainian), even though we both are the only ones talking to him exclusively on our language, as we live in an English speaking country. He speaks Ukrainian ok, but his Hungarian is just perfect, and is at par with English. It was interesting, and I didn’t know what to attribute it to. Then we got another kid, and as he is approaching 18 months now I can see already he speaks way more Hungarian words also! Indeed, my anecdotal conclusion was that it must be the language (and mind you, the Ukrainian and Hungarian languages are absolutely different) that made the difference, everything else seemed the same, especially with WFH for the past 2 years.

As far as I know, even the weak form of linguistic relativity is heavily disputed.

Please see my sibling comment with a well-written article on a more likely reason.

Probably. But when Edward Teller himself states it, I tend to listen. Perhaps he said jokingly though.

I believe it. My wife is Hungarian and I'm trying to learn the language. I'm german myself and I think german is already quite complex, but Hungarian is just nuts (or probably martian). At some points I accused my teacher that she is just making stuff up on the fly ;)

> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK.

Whether the British are prone to respect authority because of their language is debatable. It's less debatable whether those in a larger Anglophone nation are prone to respect authority! Just look at some of the behaviours we've seen over the last 18 months.

> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure.

I doubt that as the largest country by English as a first language is the US and I wouldn't say that those folks on the whole respect authority in the same way that we do.

I think the way authority is respected in the UK has more to do with our endemic class system (which still exists) and the fact that unlike most European countries we never had a revolution in the last couple of centuries (came close at points and of course there was Cromwell but that was a different kind of revolution and much earlier).

I've observed the British respect other people, society and hierarchy. Not authority per se. That's the Germans heh.

Lots of languages have orthographic depth. I doubt you'll find a correlation if you look at more than one or two languages/cultures. Heck, the French only pronounce half their letters, and they killed their monarchs.

Hungarian pretty much only does that to ease pronounciation, ie. when two consonants can't be pronounced after each other eg. "utca" (means street) etc.

The fact of Budapest being a rich city is not a surprising one because it was the capital of Hungary that was many times larger than today's Hungary, spreading from Split to Lemberg - to be reduced to "ethnic quarter" of Magyars after WWI. And every monarchy is a very center-leaning entity so the capital would concentrate wealth of the entire - much bigger than today - nation. It was a co-capital of Habsburg Empire on the same rights as Vienna.

Indeed, having its territory reduced by 73% after the war all but killed her. I mean Hungary was already on a downward trajectory after the 1526 Battle of Mohacs which she lost against the Ottomans, and that downward slope culminated in the Treaty of Trianon, which reduced the country to irrelevance ever since.

What can I say about it? It seems we like to be on the wrong side of history…

And looking at the Hungarian politics and geopolitics it's like you insist on being on a collision course with the majority of your closest neighbors. The odds of anything good coming out of that for Hungary are very slim IMHO.

Indeed. I’d love to better understand why it’s so hard not to side with the baddies every single time.

The best thing that comes out of this is that it’s easy to pinpoint the Nazis because they are the ones in power.

Not sure why you are being down voted.

I am conservative jewish, and of Hungarian descent on my mother's side. Russian on my fathers. Neither parent has a Ph.D. I do, and one of 2 brothers is a DDS, other is MS in CS. Daughter is double majoring in math and physics, with now a minor in complex systems. Going to grad school next year. She's half me, half my wife (Mexican American).

Conservative and orthodox jews tend to have quite a bit of familial pressure with regards to education. You are expected to go to school. Expected to excel. Expected to pursue a professional or medical career. I recall this growing up in the 1970s.

My dad is an EE, with a penchant for math. My mom is more psychologically inclined. Wife has an MS in Physics, and teaches college prep high school math. Daughter started out as an Art major. I kid you not. Transitioned over to Physics in her second year.

Ok, with that as the back story, a few observations.

Many of my fellow jewish students, easily a majority, have gone to post graduate education, and are doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers. Very few have not. The familial pressure was common, and we all talked about it in our groups. I see a very similar trend with Indian and Chinese American families. Same drive to succeed, with pushes from family.

Jews are not a "racial" group, we don't share locus of genes that can be used to easily identify us as such. Apart from certain families with markers for Tay-Sachs or others.

Conservative and Orthodox jews do share a culture where education is seen as the pathway to success, a better life, taking care of the extended family, etc. That is, its kind of built in to our way of life.

I interpret this to mean a number of things.

1) Genetics, while important, isn't the dominant feature of highly successful people.

2) Nurture, culture, society, support systems, etc. are the things that matter. Put another way, if you set low bars, you get results appropriate to setting of low bars. If you set high bars, and provide both a support system, and strong cultural motivation, you will get results appropriate to the setting of high bars.

For me, the martians have always been fascinating. JvN was foremost, though Paul Erdos was always a fascinating character. I don't think genetics/religion was the deciding factor for them. I think it was their environment. If it was an aberration for this time and place, or if it was common, that environment, the support systems behind it, should be studied, and leveraged.

> we don't share locus of genes that can be used to easily identify us as such

I'm one of the biggest critics when it comes to genetic reductionism, evopsych, etc and I know it's a touchy subject especially considering the terrible events that happened in WW2, and so on, but this is trivial to disprove.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_genetics_of_Jews

> Due to their historical endogamy over the centuries, today's 10 million Ashkenazi Jews can trace their ancestry to members of a population of only 350 individuals who lived about 600–800 years ago

"Endogamy" meaning marrying (and having offspring) within a small isolationist group.

Huh ... the example I used (Tay-Sachs) is an example of this. So I stand corrected. Thank you!

Thank god that the tech to sequence genomes was not available in the 1930s/1940s. Imagine what evil could be done with so much information.

> I can find a few sources if you want

Yes please. Thank you in advance!

> Jewish people (imho)

That was presented more as an impression than a data-based evaluation, but ok - it means HN has a little tolerance for para-intellectual bursts. :) (If all impressions were heartwarming, they would constitute less of a problem. They would probably not constitute a problem at all, if the mandate was clear that one's thoughts must duly be vetted.)

If you will be unable to post here, maybe you could collect some material, publish the best article on HN as a submission, and post the rest of the material in your comments there. We can check your submissions from your profile.

I've never heard anyone before making the claim that Hungarian in any way assists intellectual capacity.

I do believe there is something to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, but not to this degree. I know that, for example, Chinese students have a greater aptitude for basic arithmetic because in Chinese the sounds for the numbers are shorter and simpler than in most languages. This makes longer numbers easier to hold in short-term memory, assisting mental arithmetic. But... that's not going to churn out award-winning theoreticians!

I'm curious to know why anyone would make the claim that Hungarian is "that special" for intellectual thought. It's a bit of an odd duck of a language, sure. But not that special. To my knowledge the main beneficial property it has is that its structure makes it especially suitable for poetry. However, it shares that trait with Latin and I believe French also.

I’m not sure why you are downvoted.

I’m a native speaker and I did have a phase as a teenager when I thought that language must have to do something with intellect, mostly based on some nationalistic feeling. But I’m yet to find anything that would make it that special.

The only rare linguistic thing it has is double negation (we say I’ve never not eaten something instead of never eaten) - which might paradoxically help? (Due to people having to leave behind linguistic symbolism to properly do logical reasoning? But I’m entirely guessing here)

There was a study showing that bilingual people have a small but measurable advantage. Apparently, learning a second language helps lock in the concept that words are just arbitrary noises, accidents of history used as mere labels.

I regularly have debates with people speaking only English that conflate words with the meaning of the words. E.g.: they think that because a word or phrase has a certain root or structure, it implies something about the subject that it is describing.

For the same reason, being bilingual has a small positive effect for learning programming. It helps with the notion that variable names are just labels and it doesn't matter what specific sequence of letters they contain, the compiler doesn't care.

Obviously, none of this is special or unique to Hungarian. Knowing any two languages would have this effect...

These interviews with Edward Teller [1] offer first hand insight into some of this fascinating history, I quite enjoyed watching them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRdAp4A5KEA&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...

This interview with Cornelius Lanczos is also worth watching. He is not one of the Martians, because he went to England rather than to America, but he grew up in Budapest in the same time -- and he is a formidable storyteller.

I forgot the link:

https://youtu.be/PO6xtSxB5Vg

This is an old story, and is mentioned in various books about the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos.

Part of the article is missing, in the section about the high school years, above "of von Kármán in 1872". Many of that group went to high schools in a very small geographical area.

I feel like trying to extract a trend here might be overstating the case a bit. It is important to remember that many European intellectuals, such as Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, Emilio Segrè, Maria Goeppert-Mayer etc, fled to the US due to the rise of fascism in Europe.

On the European side, it was one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage seen at a civilizational scale. At the American end, it was a boon. There were more Noble prize winners hanging around coffee machines than you could shake a stick at.

The analysis fails to account for this; for e.g. they weren't intelligent just because they were of jewish heritage. They fled because they were intelligent and jewish. And those who didn't flee were killed. Is it any wonder that a list of fleeing European geniuses that the US govt. allowed entry into the States is dominated by jewish geniuses?

Out of this list, the only anomaly that truly stands out, and is perhaps the reason why the term "The Martians" was coined is John von Neumann. Quoting from a prior comment,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25455028

It is difficult to overstate just how smart and well rounded von Neumann was. Most contemporary accounts are from the outside looking in, but his mind was truly extraordinary. He wasn't just a genius in one capacity, but he was a genius in every capacity. It is tempting to think of him as a savant, but he was far from it. He was social, brilliant, artistic, ethically considerate, and gifted in every sense of the word. His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia. And it becomes more and more obvious the closer you get to him.

One of the best memoirs I've read is that of Marina Whitman née von Neumann, his daughter. It is her memoir, with her memories and her extraordinary life and career. But her genesis was this extraordinary being. von Neumann doted on her. He loved her and tried to fulfil the whole of her extraordinary being and train her gifted mind. The result was a woman who became an extraordinarily perceptive economist who helped guide some of the economic policy of the United States. In a way, this wasn't unexpected, as she was, of course, von Neumann's bridge to the future.

I would like to avoid reducing her story to him, but she offers a unique, familial glimpse into his mind. The early parts of her book deal with her father, and talk about his extraordinary mind. It's genuinely hard to capture the true dimensions of his mental prowess. And it's harder to capture the fact that he knew it and he tried to do his best to live up to it. That's what's so special about von Neumann. He wasn't just the greatest mind of the past millennia in sheer intellectual throughput and ability; he was a mind willing to make sacrifices to leave the Earth better than he found it. As his daughter puts it,

> Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations.

and,

> But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.

He became cynical over time. She describes his deep pessimism of humanity; something compounded by The Bomb. But then again who hasn't become a pessimist with time? He still tried to fix humans and give them things that would help move them forward. And yes, I'm talking about him separately from the rest of humanity, because his mind was profoundly different from the rest of humanity. As the article quotes Hans Bethe's famous saying, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." He was The Martian.

I don't wish to spoil the book for those who'd like to read it, but the prologue is heart wrenching. He died far too young. I can't imagine what he might have transformed had he lived into his nineties and hundreds.

> The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father's involvements, absolute privacy was essential when, in the early stages of his hospitalization, various top-ranking members of the military-industrial establishment sat at his bedside to pick his brain before it was too late. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), along with General Bernard Schriever and my father, was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father's everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.

And this, the saddest part,

> After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—mathematician of the twentieth century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like seven and six or ten and three, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I could remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of his intellectual powers remained.

> I could only choke out a couple of these pairs of numbers and then, without even registering his answers, fled the room in tears. Months earlier we had talked, with a candor rare for the time, about the fact that, at a shockingly young age and in the midst of an extraordinarily productive life, he was going to die. But that was still a father-daughter discussion, with him in the dominant role. This sudden, humiliating role reversal compounded both his pain and mine. After that, my father spoke very little or not at all, although the doctors couldn't offer any physical reason for his retreat into silence. My own explanation was that the sheer horror of experiencing the deterioration of his mental powers at the age of fifty-three was too much for him to bear. Added to this pain, I feared, was my apparent betrayal of his dreams for his only child, his link to the future which was being denied to him.

Whitman, Marina. The Martian's Daughter (p. 3). University of Michigan Press. Kindle Edition.

https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Daughter-Memoir-Marina-Whitm...

On a more shameless note, I'm compiling this as a part of my Project Karl. It's one of those books that I think everyone should know about and read, but few do. https://www.projectkarl.com

I do think someone European geniuses like Heisenberg were destroyed by WWII instead of enlivened by it, working on the German nuclear project they didn't want nor think they could succeed in, and surrounded by comparatively few other geniuses.

"ethically considerate" Didn't he want to nuke the USSR as soon as possible?

One of the early arguments for a first strike was the ability to target military installations only.

Due to the limitations in early US targeting ability, a US counter strike likely meant having to go with a counter-value response instead of a counter-force one. Meaning bigger targets like cities over smaller military-only targets.

So if you worked under the presumption that war with the Soviets was inevitable, a first strike avoided mass casualties in the magnitude of 10s of millions in favor of decapitating military targets.

So yes, there is a logical argument that it would be the more ethical choice.

It wasn't until the 80's with advances in both surveying/geodesy (predicting precise ballistic trajectories taking into account local variances in gravity) and targeting/ delivery accuracy (B-1, B-2, peacekeeper ICBMs, and better SLBMs) that the game-theory changed.

That's just not realistic. The Soviet army relied on its productive capabilities to wage war. Without destroying cities, nuclear war with the USSR would simply be absurd.

Beyond that, American intelligence in the USSR was weak, and they wouldn't have been able to pin down high value military targets. They'd also have serious issues striking deep within the USSR.

Von Neumann also recommended that Kyoto, instead of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, be nuked, despite it having very little military significance and leading to many more deaths.

By the time he started proposing a strike of the USSR, the USSR had already started deploying early warning radar, jet interceptors and even guided missile systems designed specifically to stop B-29s carryig nuclear bombs. In testing they proved to be even more effective than needed to completely protect the installations they were defending against slow and heavy bombers. A strike in 1951 would have been a total disaster and would have not at all stopped their industry. The US didn't even know where they were making bombs.

His political views were that coexistence with the USSR was impossible. As it turns out, the USSR had no plans of invading the US, he was simply wrong.

Let's not try to whitewash history. Neumann knew that Soviet intelligence and counter intelligence was formidable. He knew that the strength of the Soviet military was in its cities . He had already recommended nuclear strikes on civilian population centers with low military value. He was noted by his fellow physicists to be unperturbed by his work. It's quite unlikely that he had any illusions about what as needed to actually stop the Soviet war machine.

He thought that the Soviet Union could coexist with the US. He was violent in his hatred of the Soviets and was militaristic. He thought that the US had to defeat the Soviets sooner than later. Surely we both realize that this means millions of dead.

>Let's not try to whitewash history.

That's what you're doing by discounting what was a fairly popular political opinion of the time.

>That's just not realistic. The Soviet army relied on its productive capabilities to wage war.

None of that matters if you get hit with a Soviet first strike.

The main goal wasn't to take out the conventional war machine, but the Soviet Nuclear capabilities. Counter force vs counter value.

And this was before "Spheres of Influence" was accepted as a realistic possibility on either side, when the admitted Soviet policy was that communism had to be spread worldwide, even if it came to instigating war. So a first strike wasn't just thought possible, but expected.

IIRC the quote I've seen on HN, it wasn't "nuke USSR as soon as possible", but more like "given that you already want to nuke Moscow tomorrow, why not do it today?".

It's probably not fair to judge that without recalling that he was a teenager during the Red Terror in Hungary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_(Hungary)

Right. So it's ethically considerate to kill 50 million people in pure vengeance for 600?

That was not his reason, as I stated in another comment. You're free to educate yourself about his thoughts on the matter, which would be much more productive than a snarky comment.

I have already. I don't believe what he said publicly. I see no reason why I would have to. He was noted to be much more cruel and unconcerned with the destructive power of the nuclear bomb than his peers and recommended the nuking of civilian targets. He spoke of the necessity to destroy the USSR on ideological grounds. The idea that a preemptive strike would be limited against a nuclearly armed country is preposterous and ridiculous, and he had already suggested nuking for population destruction instead of military use.

Yes, but due to ethical considerations. One doesn't have to agree with the outcome of his reasoning, but it's well established that his reasons were ethical, not cynical or egoistic.

The ethical considerations of killing 50+ million?

He was convinced that without an American preemptive strike, even more would die. He was wrong of course, as we now know, but it wasn't clear at that time.

There's an episode of Hardcore History on this topic, I think the title was "Destroyer of Worlds".

It was pretty clear at the time that the Soviets had no intention or capability to destroy the US in such a way that the US would not able to respond with a nuclear strike.

He was noted by his colleagues to be exceptionally unperturbed by his work. He recommended that the US strike Kyoto despite having no military significance to speak of.

He himself admitted that he was ideologically violently opposed to the existence of the USSR. It's clear that his motives were not about minimizing death and destruction.

Socialism is evil, but not as evil as killing tens of millions of humans.

> His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia.

I'm sure the guy was smart, but lets not overdo it.

I don't think you can overdo it when it comes to Jansci

“There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann” — George Pólya

“von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.” — Edward Teller

...One afternoon around 4:50 p.m. John von Neumann came by and saw what Fermi had on the blackboard and asked what he was doing. So Enrico told him and John von Neumann said “That’s very interesting.” He came back about 15 minutes later and gave him the answer. Fermi leaned against his doorpost and told me, “You know that man makes me feel I know no mathematics at all.” — Enrico Fermi

”You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is” — Enrico Fermi again

“One had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch.” — Eugene Wigner

It goes on and on...

https://superintelligence.fandom.com/wiki/John_von_Neumann_(...

How does this tell us something about the last 1000 years? You want to call him the smartest man of the 20th century sure go ahead, but you hardly have any idea about the other 9 centuries.

Can you point to anyone like him in the recorded history of the last thousand years? There may well be some whose lives were unrecorded or of whom the records were lost.

Yes that's my point, it's pretty much impossible to guarantee that he's the smartest of the last 1000 years.

Survivorship bias is maybe the worst bias of our time. It's so ubiquitous.

Gauss comes to mind.

Gauss far exceeded von neuman in mathematical impact and pushing math forward. So did many other mathematicians that were contemporaries of von neuman. The same for physics. Von Neuman would not even be in the list of top 10 mathematicians in the 20th Century, let alone of all time. The twentieth century had giants like Kolmogorov, Hilbert, Grothendieck, none of whom were smarter than von neumann, but they made far greater discoveries.

But this just shows that when you are talking about impact as opposed to intelligence, a lot of things other than IQ come into play. I am certain von neumann was much smarter than Gauss, but Gauss had an instinct for discovery that was remarkable. Newton is another example -- someone not nearly as brilliant as Von Neuman (my impression) but had an incredibly deep insight and much bigger impact. They say that Feynman's IQ was ~120, which would certainly be lower than von neuman, but he made a much bigger impact as well.

I wouldn’t go far as to say Von Neumann was smarter than Grothendieck. I think they’re both different types of geniuses, where their genius manifest in different ways. Grothendieck was a genius in working with extremely deep abstractions, I’d say he eclipses Von Neumann in this way, whereas Von Neumann had a different type of genius in which he eclipsed others at. In Grothendieck’s case he was a profound genius, who made profound impacts in mathematics.

Another mathematician that reminds me of Von Neumann is Euler. He also memorized long passages and could do complicated calculations in his head quickly.

A quote on Euler from wikipedia:

“He was able to, for example, repeat the Aeneid of Virgil from beginning to end without hesitation, and for every page in the edition he could indicate which line was the first and which was the last even decades after having read it”

>I wouldn’t go far as to say Von Neumann was smarter than Grothendieck

He famously recounted his inability to derive Heron's formula for the area of a triangle when he was a teenager (despite realizing that such a formula ought to exist via conceptual reasoning), and seems to have subsequently kept an unbalanced set of talents in the same vein.

Grothendieck was the best in class at abstract mathematical reasoning and some regard him as the best mathematician in the 20th century. The Heron Formula or “prime” example doesn’t negate that

His wikipedia page goes into more detail on that front. Considered the top mathematician of his time (with also major contributions to physics and computer science), other world-class mathematicians and physicists being in awe of his abilities, sometimes solving (never before answered) math problems easily, being able to recite word-for-word the books and articles he read, years after reading them, simultaneously translating them as necessary, etc.

Ordinarily that would be hyperbole...

Maybe Newton was on the same level? Or Gauss? Or Leonardo?

Or maybe not.

There have probably been dozens of people in the past millennium who had the potential to develop that kind of mind, but most of them probably lived and died without the opportunity to develop their gifts, whether because of enslavement, rural poverty, or lack of access to education.

I really don't know if that's overdoing it. Da Vinci might compare, but I suspect that even he would be in awe at some of Neumann's abilities.

This was an interesting read; I was shocked to find so many seemed to enter straight into PhD programmes after completing school. Most were done by the time they were 25. Wow!

I don't think that was unusual at the time? Mean age of finishing a PhD has gone up over the decades, though I can't give a figure from memory, and there may be a U.S./Europe difference too.

Getting a PhD young is mostly the luck of a birthdate and a benevolent advisor (and probably a non-experimental topic). Isn’t the uk system 3-year which makes it more likely. The trick is the pertinence of the work that’s done and who you impress.

I have a feeling that Ernő Rubik (the creator of the Rubik's Cube) should be on that list, except that he didn't move to the US. He's 77 now.

Since we are talking about ethnicity here, I've heard that Rubik's father's ethnicity was Armenian. I don't have a link, though.

For further perspective, I also recommend reading Scott Alexander's retelling at

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

It's a bit strange that Scott Alexander, when counting famous physicists with Jewish ancestry, counts zero of Russian/Soviet ones, and ever tries to explain this (pogroms, persecution, etc.)

There is quite a number of such physicists. Lev Landau, Abram Ioffe, Igor Tamm, Mikhail Leontovich, Zhores Alferov, Alexander Friedmann, Matvei Bronstein.

A list of famous Russian/Jewish mathematicians is also impressive.

Overall, ethnic Jews were totally over-represented in Soviet science...

It helped not being a specific political target of the state.

>> Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man",[19] and later Bethe wrote that "[von Neumann's] brain indicated a new species, an evolution beyond man"

From John von Neumann's wikipedia article. Fascinating idea.

When I was a child, I enjoyed working through a book called "Hungarian Problem Book", which contained much more interesting and fun problems than I had seen up to that point. It certainly had a stimulating and energizing effect on me. Worth a look if you're interested in math problems.

There is a lot of discussion in this thread about intelligence, Hungarians, Jews, old central European schools and coffee shops, etc.

In my experience, the main conclusion I come to is: Humans are super TOUGH to characterize, measure meaningfully, predict, etc. SUPER tough.

E.g., there is the stumbling block of the usual dichotomy of nature (i.e., genetics, DNA) and nurture (i.e., the environment of their childhood, etc.).

We can try to focus on just the nature part, but again we get stumbling blocks of the wide variety of outcomes from, seemingly, too many factors.

Sure, can give a test with 100 questions to millions of people and then use the linear algebra principle components decomposition to find 100 orthogonal factors and eigenvalues. Then there is a claim that IQ is just the largest of the 100 factors. Sooooo, that omits 99 other factors. Hmm .... Then, tough to have much faith in IQ.

So, we can suspect that the other 99 factors can help or ruin the effect of the IQ factor. In my experience, that can happen.

I'm not Jewish or Hungarian and have never made any particular effort to have contact with either, but one way and another by accident or forces unknown at the time to me have had some contact. So:

(a) Dad thought that a big advantage would be a college education so I got one.

(b) Mom thought that a big advantage would be a Ph.D. so I got one. So did my brother.

(c) In grades 1-8, the teachers regarded me as in the bottom half of the class, maybe near or at the bottom of the class. So I tended to give up on school or trying to do well. My parents were fine with that.

(d) I'm a male, and, as is common for boys, by the 8th grade my handwriting was still a mess. So, with that mess, my accuracy in 8th grade arithmetic was poor, and the teacher warmly advised me never to take anymore math.

(e) In the 9th grade, I saw that I could do well in math so did. My main motivation was to reverse the 8 years of the teachers treating me as a poor student. Sooooo, that was the goofy reason I got into math. Lesson: A lot of what happens to people can be from just goofy reasons that have nothing to do with IQ or ability.

The school I went to in grades 1-12 was intended as the city's premier college prep school. Supposedly 97% of the students went on to college. Since there was no Jewish high school in town, the Jewish kids also went to that school. Then in the Math SATs, of #1, #2, #3, I was #2 and #1 and #3 were Jewish. I had done nearly as well or a little better than both of them in grade 9-12 math classes. I had made no effort to compete: I had come to like math and enjoyed cutting off insults from the teachers. I didn't see anything very special about the abilities of the Jewish students.

As I continued in math, I heard about several of the names of the Jewish Hungarian mathematicians in the OP: Halmos remains my favorite author. Once I got von Neumann's Quantum Mechanics and got through the first half, just some math, the physics was later, easily enough before got interrupted by other work. Von Neumann's game theory work was heavily around the saddle point result, and that is an easy result of duality in the linear algebra of linear programming. I heard about Wigner since my ugrad honors paper was on group representations for molecular spectroscopy. Early in my career, I was at GE as they took Kemeny's work on Basic and timesharing, etc. and made a business out of it. Later I was reading Feynman's Lectures and saw his remark that a particle of unknown position has uniform probability distribution over all of space. If that space has the usual assumption of infinite area, then there can be no such distribution. For the Manhattan Project picture of von Neumann, Feynman, and Ulam, once I used Ulam's result tightness in a paper I published. Once I published a paper on a fine detail about the (Karush) Kuhn-Tucker conditions. Later I saw that the famous paper of Arrow (mentioned in the OP), Hurwicz, and Uzawa mentioned a problem, and my work solved that problem also. The Chair of my Ph.D. orals committee was Jewish -- the brightest prof in his department was not Jewish or Hungarian.

Point: I've never had any ambitions to be at the top of academics, but I have not found that work the Jews or Hungarians do is too difficult to understand or, in some cases, extend.

As an example of the influence of the other 99 factors, maybe the brightest person I knew was my wife. She was Valedictorian, PBK, Summa Cum Laude, ..., etc. But some of those 99 factors proved fatal.

Concluding Suggestion: When see some good work, e.g., the Halmos work on sufficient statistics, a good performance of the Bach Chaconne, e.g.,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjEVKxQCWs

or the

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto no.2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGOihjqO9w

etc., just be glad for such good parts of civilization, credit the person doing the work, and f'get about whatever 100 factors, nature, nurture, etc. were the cause.

Scott Alexander had a version of this story where he described the atomic bomb as a Hungarian high school science project:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

I'd like to offer my point as Hungarian, and enthusiast of the history of Hungarian mathematics education, who heard lots of stories from math teacher grandparents.

This article is great read, well researched and quoted. Still, I think what it really misses to hit home and hammer down is the context and background where it all came from: the unbelievable greatness of the math education and math teachers of this country with streak going on over 100 years even though we might be at the end tail now (but still, great results still being achieved at the math olympics, if that is a metric that would matter to the reader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38xeYPAUPd0).

So while the Martians are of course worthy of accolades since their (+ || -) contributions and their unique and sad background are much more exceptional than every one of their peers but they weren't just one off geniuses. They were a culmination of many things.

From year to year, like some american sports draft an unusually high output of great systems thinkers and numbermongers entered almost all fields of real sciences.

It all starts perhaps w/ Sipos Pal, Farkas Gyula, and the father Bolyai Farkas, figureheads of Hungarian sciences of the 19th century. They set down the basics of sciences education of Hungary with decades of hard work. They and their peers organised societies for math and physics and later started publishing KoMal math journal - mentioned in the article - in 1891 which is still active to this day) to be able to build out common curriculum integrating the advanced concepts of the time, Bolyai also traveled Europe went to Gottingen and befriended Gauss to start creating continental connections. The wider context always proved to be favorable except the abhorrent times of 2nd world war. But even then, these amazing people of course had to flee for their lives but during their childhood they were able to develop their crafts because first the Austro-Hungarian Empire then also the interwar "kingdom" needed to display intellectual sovereignty and then when socialism slided in, that regime was highly interested in praising the sciences instead of religion, and also did good by opening up universities and education in general for the women the poor the peasents. For the past 150 years, up until now this also meant that being sciences teacher in elementary or high-school were most respectable and lifelong vocations held in high regard in these societies. It's an incredibly delicate and complicated topic that I might not have the vocabulary to flesh out fully.

So to get back to the main poin, that the Martians weren't Martians in the context of the history of maths in Hungary. By the time the next generation grew up the flood gates have opened, here's a semi-random sampling sans Martians, starting from 1802 until 1960s, the main epicenters being Transylvania -> Budapest -> Szeged -> Budapest && Debrecen && Szeged, so it was really not just a locality in say 1 city:

son Bolyai Janos, Eotvos Lorand, Valyi Gyula, Konig Denes & brother Konig Gyorgy, Fejer Lipot, Szego Gabor, Riesz Frigyes & brother Marcell, Haar Alfred, Szokefalvy-nagy father & son (before the Martians these 4 were the first generation of widely famous Hungarian mathematicians, I believe), Szego Gabor, Egervary Jeno, Kerekjarto Bela, Lanczos Kornel, Rado Tibor, Nemenyi Pal, Redei Laszlo, Kalmar Laszlo, Janossy Lajos, the couple Szekeres Eszter and Gyorgy, Peter Rozsa, Hajos Gyorgy, the power couple Turan Pal and T. Sos Vera, Gallai Tibor, Fejes Toth Laszlo, Suranyi Janos, Bodo Zalan, Erdos' favourite pal Renyi Alfred, Fary Istvan, Lax Peter, Csaszar Akos, Hajnal Andras, Aczel Janos, Csakany Bela, Szemeredi Endre, Bollobas Bela, Lovasz Laszlo, Csirmaz Laszlo, Tusnady Gabor, Barany Imre, Babai Laszlo, Furedi Zoltan, Komjath Peter, Pach Janos, Stipsicz Andras

(Important to note that as in many fields these great scientists were also teaching, and many of the teachers below were also researching and publishing.)

My heart and admiration goes out to all these brilliant minds. It's all due to the opportunity to learn, which was made available through the works and sacrifices of great teachers:

Ratz Laszlo has been portrayed in the article but there are more:

Sutak Jozsef, Arany Daniel, Konig Gyula, Farago Andor & brother Laszlo, Bauer Mihaly, Jordan Karoly, Szele Tibor, Soos Paula, Varga Otto, Szasz Pal, Kunfalvi Rezso, Bakos Tibor, Szenassy Barna, Imrecze Zoltanne, Farkas Miklos, Rabai Imre, Posa Lajos, Pataki Janos, and the many unnamed dedicated and humane teachers who worked hard every day with every class.

(And not to forget Kulin Gyorgy, who founded amateur astronomy in Hungary and is the most important astronomy teacher and discoverer of our country.)

I wouldn't know this much if not for the collected writings of Vekerdi Laszlo, a great historian of maths educators and mathematicians of the country and Szenassy Barna who wrote a huge monography.

Unfortunately there aren't many good links in [EN] except for Wikipedia but I tried to extend on the part of the article that I think it is crucial for correct understanding and historical clarity. I wish I would have time to write a sentence or two about each of these names. I can't do that right now but there are some great books in English to read for those who are interested.

How odd but how great. It's a disaster and hard to quantify the loss caused by the fascistic decade or so.

And to the author, lastly: Thanks for spreading the word!

My pet theory is that Jewish culture didn't suffer from the generational drain of monastic orders. In Medieval times, a smart Jewish kid – especially future Rabbis – would be expected to "be fruitful and multiply". A smart Catholic kid would more often become a celibate cog of the Church, thus ending their line.

Protestant priests have married since the reformation (Luther married). So in the mostly protestant Northern and Western Europe, and in the mostly protestant US, there was no celibacy requirements for 4-500 centuries.

> Protestant

this article is about hapsburg empire - direct line to the holy roman empire & 100% catholic officially

But the comment I replied to was not.

> 4-500 centuries.

that would be 500 years

Almost, yes. It happened gradually over decades, and I would assume that all unmarried priests weren't replaced right away.

In practice I'd say that a lot of priests did father children. Made of flesh and blood...

And those 'bastards' were often treated horrifically for the mother's crimes. This lasted well up into the last century.

Even today children of single mothers are at a large disadvantage, but at least it's not quite as institutional and savage.

> Even today children of single mothers are at a large disadvantage,

Except that today, with few exceptions, the decision to have that child rests entirely with the mother.

With respect to family matters, females, especially in modern societies, have many more options than any other demographic of that society, or indeed, in all of history.

It's not quite comparable to how bastard children and their mothers were treated in the past.

Except except coerced sex.

Most likely their mom's husband was "daddy" and they were raised like their half-siblings, as peasants.

Is there evidence that monastic orders selected kids for intelligence? This effect should have then stopped with the protestant reformation in parts of europe. Maybe it is part of the reason why protestant heritage countries are more successful than catholic ones.

It's more likely to have selected younger sons, who did not inherit, and were more likely to seek a monastic or otherwise religious life.

Aren't younger sons less risk averse and thus more likely to bring forth societal change?

I think Jewish culture has a tendency of making the cleverest man marry the richest woman — and overall pay close attention to discovering talent within their communities.

Wow, someone should explain the history of algebra to Diophantus of Alexandria.

Diophhntus certainly is the father of Algebra, but he only laid a concrete foundation that al-Khwarizmi solidified into a distinct field and built into the castle its become today. A lot more than that simple foundation, but you're point is taken.

It might just be shifting degrees of intellectual challenge.

St Augustine came to shine as part as a response to the threat of competing movements such as pelagianism and arianism.

(As a side-note, reading the Confessions I came off thinking St Augustine felt really anti-intellectual; especially in contrast to someone like Boethius)

Then the church went largely intellectually unchallenged for a thousand years, and that's never great for bringing out the best and the brightest. A lot of what made for example the philosophers of antiquity so sharp was the fierce competition between rival schools.

Later when the church came under real pressure from the reformation, you had counter-reformation groups like the Jesuits form as a response which was a huge step up intellectually.

I also think we sort of tend to unfairly view the church through the writings of its critics; both reformists and later the enlightenment had a lot to say that we just seem to take as true without consideration of the source. A lot of stuff, even bad stuff like the inquisition, wasn't as bad as we tend to think. Against the background of what legal systems in general looked in the period, the inquisition was almost gentle.

> A lot of stuff, even bad stuff like the inquisition, wasn't as bad as we tend to think. Against the background of what legal systems in general looked in the period, the inquisition was almost gentle.

The Inquisition, in places, was every bit as bad as it was rumored. You are correct that the inquisition was supposed to be "gentle" up until it pleased the Holy Spirit to have the heretic burned who did not change their beliefs.

----

And in some places, the program went more according to plan:

Inquisitor: Yo dude, do you believe the $CATHLOC_TRUTH

If dude say yes, dude goes free, otherwise continue.

Inquisitor: Yo, here's fifty reasons that $CATHLOC_TRUTH is true. Do you believe now?

If dude say yes, dude goes free, otherwise continue.

Inquisitor: Yo, I'm locking you up for six months to think about it.

Inquisitor: Yo dude, do you believe the $CATHLOC_TRUTH, if not you are going to burn.

If dude say yes, dude goes free, otherwise dude gets burnt.

----

So at each step of the process there is an "escape hatch" if someone is willing to renounce what they believed and submit.

---

But in Spain, it was different. The Spanish style went with the theory that the worst heretics would try to hide their heresy, and therefor agreeing with the $CATHLOC_TRUTH was actually a sign of hidden evil. So in Spain:

Inquisitor: Yo dude, you are a HERITIC!

Dude: I believe the $CATHLOC_TRUTH.

Inquisitor: That's just what a hectic would say! We are going to torture you until you say you don't really believe the $CATHLOC_TRUTH and you tell us the names of at least six of your friends and relative who are also secret heritcs. Then we will burn you. Lastly, once you are dead I'll keep all your money and lands, and then go arrest your friends/family and repeat.

----

Again, in theory, the inquisition was supposed to use only very gentle forms of torture, like waterboarding, but the actual practice in southern Spain was even worse.

I think our views of the inquisition largely are in agreement. I'm not trying to whitewash the inquisition. Things did go overboard, especially in Spain, and I'm not denying that.

The public conception of the inquisition is only of the horrors. That just isn't correct; and it's especially not something that the pope intended to happen.

A more recent (fairly famous) example, the Big Bang theory was formulated by a Catholic priest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

Jesuits definitely look at science as a way of discovering the beauty of the world created by God.

Then the litany of Christian scientists will disprove you.

Scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power - https://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/

Compound that effect over generations.