List of famous writers from Hungary, listed alphabetically with photos when available. Hungary is home to many prolific writers, including those who write fiction, non-fiction, poetry, biographies and more. These are some of the best Hungarian writers that have ever lived, so if you're a native of Hungary and an aspiring writer then use this list as inspiration to achieve your own writing goals.
List writers range from Katalin Petényi to Péter Kuczka.
This list answers the questions, "Who are popular Hungarian writers?" and "Which writers are from Hungary?"
You can click on the names of these renowned writers of Hungary in order to get more information about each one. Some of these historic writers may no longer be living in Hungary, but they're all of Hungary descent.- Franz Liszt (German: [ˈlɪst]; Hungarian: Liszt Ferencz, in modern usage Liszt Ferenc [ˈlist ˈfɛrɛnt͡s]; 22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886) was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, and organist of the Romantic era. He was also a writer, a philanthropist, a Hungarian nationalist and a Franciscan tertiary. Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nineteenth century for his prodigious virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was a friend, musical promoter and benefactor to many composers of his time, including Frédéric Chopin, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Ole Bull, Joachim Raff, Mikhail Glinka, and Alexander Borodin.A prolific composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School (Neudeutsche Schule). He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work which influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated 20th-century ideas and trends. Among Liszt's musical contributions were the symphonic poem, developing thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form, and radical innovations in harmony.
- Birthplace: Raiding, Austria
- Nationality: Austrian Empire, Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Die Ideale, Etüden für pianoforte zu zwei Händen, Liszt Society publications, Missa Choralis, 12éme rapsodie hongroise
- Arthur Koestler, (UK: , US: ; German: [ˈkœstlɐ]; Hungarian: Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and apart from his early school years was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany until he resigned in 1938, disillusioned by Stalinism. In 1940, he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work that gained him international fame. Over the next 43 years, from his residence in Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes, and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies and numerous essays. In 1968 he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for [his] outstanding contribution to European culture" and in 1972 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and in 1979 with terminal leukaemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at their home in London.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: France, Hungary, United Kingdom
- Works: Darkness at Noon, The Gladiators, Arrow in the Blue, The Invisible Writing, The Sleepwalkers
- George Mikes (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmikɛʃ]; 15 February 1912 – 30 August 1987) was a Hungarian-born British journalist, humourist and writer, best known for his humorous commentaries on various countries.
- Birthplace: Siklós, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, United Kingdom
- Works: How to Be a Brit, How To Be Decadent, The Land of the Rising Yen, Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship, How to unite nations
- Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor (12 May 1908 – 30 September 1986), born Káldor Miklós, was a Cambridge economist in the post-war period. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons (1939), derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. Both Myrdal and Kaldor examine circular relationships, where the interdependencies between factors are relatively strong, and where variables interlink in the determination of major processes. Gunnar Myrdal got the concept from Knut Wicksell and developed it alongside Nicholas Kaldor when they worked together at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Myrdal concentrated on the social provisioning aspect of development, while Kaldor concentrated on demand-supply relationships to the manufacturing sector. Kaldor also coined the term "convenience yield" related to commodity markets and the so-called theory of storage, which was initially developed by Holbrook Working.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, United Kingdom
- Works: India tax reform, Essays on economic policy, Causes Slow Rate Economic Growth, Further essays in applied economics, Expenditure Tax
- Born on November 22, 1958, in Santa Monica, California, Jamie Lee Curtis hails from a lineage of Hollywood royalty. She is the daughter of Janet Leigh, an actress renowned for her role in Psycho, and Tony Curtis, a heartthrob actor of the 1950s and 60s. Despite this prestigious background, Curtis carved out a unique niche for herself, becoming a celebrated actress, author, and activist. Curtis's acting career took off in 1978 when she starred in John Carpenter's horror film Halloween. Her portrayal of Laurie Strode, a teenager battling the infamous Michael Myers, earned her the title of scream queen and set the stage for her subsequent roles in other horror films like The Fog and Prom Night. However, Curtis proved her versatility by branching out into various genres, demonstrating her comedic chops in films such as A Fish Called Wanda and Trading Places, and her dramatic prowess in True Lies, for which she won a Golden Globe Award. In addition to her illustrious acting career, Curtis has made significant contributions as an author. She has penned numerous children's books, including Tell Me Again About The Night I Was Born and Today I Feel Silly: And Other Moods That Make My Day, both of which have been lauded for their sensitivity and charm. Curtis is also known for her activism, particularly concerning issues of addiction and children's hospitals. Her life exemplifies a remarkable blend of talent, creativity, and dedication, making her a truly influential figure in the entertainment industry.
- Birthplace: Los Angeles, California, USA
- Nationality: United States of America
- Works: Today I feel silly & other moods that make my day, Tell me again about the night I was born, Cuentame Otra Vez LA Noche Que Naci, When I was little, The Jamie Lee Curtis CD Audio Collection
- Béla Viktor János Bartók (; Hungarian: Bartók Béla, pronounced [ˈbɒrtoːk ˈbeːlɒ]; 25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.
- Birthplace: Sânnicolau Mare, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Prince Bluebeard's castle, Bluebeard's castle, The first term at the piano, Bartok - His Greatest, Letters
- Goldie Hawn, born on November 21, 1945, in Washington D.C., is a highly acclaimed actress, producer, and singer, recognized for her vivacious charm and comedic flair. Daughter of a dance school owner and a musician, Hawn's early years were steeped in the performing arts, priming her for an illustrious career in Hollywood. She began her journey in the entertainment industry as a professional dancer before making her acting debut in the 1960s. Hawn's breakthrough came with the sketch comedy show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, which aired from 1968 to 1970. Her infectious humor and distinctive giggle quickly made her a fan favorite, leading to more prominent roles in film. In 1969, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Cactus Flower, solidifying her status as a formidable talent in the industry. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hawn starred in a string of successful films including Shampoo, The Sugarland Express, and Private Benjamin, earning her a second Academy Award nomination. In addition to her acting career, Hawn has also made significant contributions behind the scenes. She co-founded The Hawn Foundation, which focuses on youth education programs. Furthermore, she stepped into the role of producer for several projects, including the film Private Benjamin. Her enduring appeal continues to inspire future generations of performers, reinforcing her legacy as one of the most influential figures in the entertainment industry.
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C., USA
- Nationality: United States of America
- Works: A Lotus Grows in the Mud, Goldie
- Sir Alexander Korda (; born Sándor László Kellner, 16 September 1893 – 23 January 1956) was a British film producer and director and screenwriter, who founded his own film production studios and film distribution company.Born in Hungary, where he began his career, he worked briefly in the Austrian and German film industries during the era of silent films, before being based in Hollywood from 1926 to 1930 for the first of his two brief periods there (the other was during World War II). The change led to the divorce from his first wife, the Hungarian film actress María Corda, who could not make the transition because of her strong accent. From 1930, Korda was active in the British film industry, and soon became one of its leading figures. He was the founder of London Films and, post-war, the owner of British Lion Films, a film distribution company. Korda was the first filmmaker to have been granted a knighthood.
- Birthplace: Túrkeve, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungarian Soviet Republic, Hungarian Democratic Republic, United Kingdom, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Tales of the Typewriter, The One Million Pound Note, Struggling Hearts, White Nights
- Peter Lorre, one of the most distinctive actors of the early 20th century, was born on June 26, 1904, in Ružomberok, Hungary. As a child, he demonstrated a flair for the performing arts, leading him to pursue his passion professionally. Lorre's initial breakthrough came with his chilling performance in Fritz Lang's M (1931), a crime thriller where he portrayed a serial killer in a role that established his iconic presence in the world of cinema. Lorre moved to Hollywood in the mid-1930s after gaining recognition in Germany. His transition wasn't just geographical but also professional as he moved from playing lead roles in German cinema to supporting roles in Hollywood. He notably starred in Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and later became part of Warner Brothers' ensemble cast in the popular detective series Mr. Moto. Lorre's unique voice and persona made him a natural fit for both sinister villains and comic sidekicks, showcasing his commendable versatility as an actor. Despite battling drug addiction and health problems, Lorre made significant contributions to film and television. He lent his voice to numerous animated characters, marking a new chapter in his career. Lorre's life was marked by immense struggle and immense talent, making him a compelling figure in Hollywood history. He passed away on March 23, 1964, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire generations of performers.
- Birthplace: Rózsahegy, Austria-Hungary
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary, United States of America
- Eliezer Wiesel (, Hebrew: אֱלִיעֶזֶר וִיזֶל ʾĔlîʿezer Vîzel; September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.Along with writing, he was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C. In his political activities, he also campaigned for victims of oppression in places like South Africa, Nicaragua, Kosovo, and Sudan. He publicly condemned the 1915 Armenian Genocide and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He was described as "the most important Jew in America" by the Los Angeles Times.Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind", stating that through his struggle to come to terms with "his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps", as well as his "practical work in the cause of peace", Wiesel had delivered a message "of peace, atonement, and human dignity" to humanity. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active throughout his life.
- Birthplace: Sighetu Marmației, Romania
- Nationality: United States of America, Romania
- Works: Night, The Night Trilogy, Zalmen or the Madness of God, Wise Men and Their Tales, The Jews of silence
- Miklós Rózsa (Hungarian: [ˈmikloːʃ ˈroːʒɒ]; 18 April 1907 – 27 July 1995) was a Hungarian-American composer trained in Germany (1925–1931), and active in France (1931–1935), the United Kingdom (1935–1940), and the United States (1940–1995), with extensive sojourns in Italy from 1953. Best known for his nearly one hundred film scores, he nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout what he called his "double life."Rózsa achieved early success in Europe with his orchestral Theme, Variations, and Finale (Op. 13) of 1933 and became prominent in the film industry from such early scores as The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). The latter project brought him to America when production was transferred from wartime Britain, and Rózsa remained in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1946. His notable Hollywood career earned him considerable fame, earning 17 Oscar nominations including 3 wins for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959), while his concert works were championed by such major artists as Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, and János Starker.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Double life
- Zsa Zsa Gabor, born on February 6, 1917, in Budapest, Hungary, was an iconic actress and socialite known for her glamorous lifestyle and numerous marriages. She was the middle of three daughters, with her older sister Magda and younger sister Eva also achieving prominence in Hollywood. In her early years, Gabor was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936, a title that foreshadowed her future as a sought-after beauty in the entertainment industry. Gabor's acting career took off in the United States after she migrated from Europe during World War II. Her debut role in the film Lovely to Look At in 1952 paved the way for a successful acting career in Hollywood. The starlet became a fixture in television and film throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with memorable roles in movies like Moulin Rouge and TV shows like The Life of Riley. Gabor's thick Hungarian accent, sparkling personality, and quick wit made her a darling of American talk shows and variety programs. She also became known for her signature catchphrase, Dah-ling, which she used endearingly to refer to almost everyone. Gabor's personal life was as dramatic and colorful as her on-screen presence. She married nine times, most famously to hotel magnate Conrad Hilton and actor George Sanders. Despite her many marriages, Gabor once said, "I am a marvelous housekeeper: Every time I leave a man, I keep his house." This quip demonstrates her sharp humor and ability to maintain a light-hearted perspective on her tumultuous love life. Gabor passed away in 2016, leaving a legacy of glamour, charm, and resilience that continues to captivate audiences worldwide.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Zsa Zsa Gábor
Emeric Pressburger (5 December 1902 – 5 February 1988) was a Hungarian British screenwriter, film director, and producer. He is best known for his series of film collaborations with Michael Powell, in an award-winning collaboration partnership known as the Archers and produced a series of films, notably 49th Parallel (1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946, also called Stairway to Heaven), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).- Birthplace: Miskolc, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, England
- Works: The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale
- Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system. Tesla gained experience in telephony and electrical engineering before immigrating to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison in New York City. He soon struck out on his own with financial backers, setting up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. His patented AC induction motor and transformer were licensed by George Westinghouse, who also hired Tesla for a short time as a consultant.
- Birthplace: Smiljan, Croatia
- Nationality: Austrian Empire, United States of America, Austria-Hungary
- Works: The Inventions, Researches, and Writings of Nikola Tesla, Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900
- Set designer with UFA before moving in the 1930s to Western Europe, where he produced ingenious short advertising films featuring wire-jointed, stylized puppets. In 1940 Pal moved to Hollywood, where he produced the "Puppetoons" series for Paramount and began directing and/or producing special-effects oriented features including "War of the Worlds" (1953) and "The Time Machine" (1960). He received a special Academy Award in 1943 for developing a technique which combined animation with live action.
- Birthplace: Cegléd, Austria-Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, Time Machine II
- Sir Georg Solti, (born György Stern; 21 October 1912 – 5 September 1997) was a Hungarian-born orchestral and operatic conductor, best known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Budapest, he studied there with Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner and Ernő Dohnányi. In the 1930s, he was a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera and worked at the Salzburg Festival for Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis' influence on Hungarian politics, and being of Jewish background he fled the increasingly harsh Hungarian anti-Jewish laws in 1938. After conducting a season of Russian ballet in London at the Royal Opera House he found refuge in Switzerland, where he remained during the Second World War. Prohibited from conducting there, he earned a living as a pianist. After the war, Solti was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In 1952 he moved to the Oper Frankfurt, where he remained in charge for nine years. He took West German citizenship in 1953. In 1961 he became musical director of the Covent Garden Opera Company, London. During his ten-year tenure, he introduced changes that raised standards to the highest international levels. Under his musical directorship the status of the company was recognised with the grant of the title "the Royal Opera". He became a British citizen in 1972. In 1969 Solti became music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for 22 years. He relinquished the position in 1991 and became the orchestra's music director laureate, a position he held until his death. During his time as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's eighth music director, he also served as music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1972 until 1975 and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1979 until 1983. Known in his early years for the intensity of his music making, Solti was widely considered to have mellowed as a conductor in later years. He recorded many works two or three times at various stages of his career, and was a prolific recording artist, making more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. The most famous of his recordings is probably Decca's complete set of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, made between 1958 and 1965. Solti's Ring has twice been voted the greatest recording ever made, in polls for Gramophone magazine in 1999 and the BBC's Music Magazine in 2012. Solti was repeatedly honoured by the recording industry with awards throughout his career, including a record 31 Grammy Awards as a recording artist.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, United Kingdom
- Works: Solti on Solti
- A lifelong horror fan who possessed great love for the genre and the works of Stephen King in particular, Frank Darabont's career as a writer and director yielded three Oscar nominations and worldwide acclaim for "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994), "The Green Mile" (1999) and "The Mist" (2007). He began his filmmaking career after asking King's permission to shoot a short film based on one of his stories; the project led to scripting for several minor horror films and TV series before the bittersweet drama of "Shawshank" brought him to international attention. Darabont found the heart and the literacy at the center of King's works - something few other directors had achieved - and continued to mine success from the author's library with "The Green Mile" and the darker "Mist." In doing so, Darabont brought integrity artistic quality to a genre that had sorely lacked such laudable elements for decades.
- Birthplace: Montbéliard, Doubs, France
- Nationality: France, United States of America, Hungary
- Works: The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Mist, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob
- Ephraim Kishon (Hebrew: אֶפְרַיִם קִישׁוֹן, August 23, 1924 – January 29, 2005) was an Israeli author, dramatist, screenwriter, and Oscar-nominated film director. He was one of the most widely read contemporary satirists in the world.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Israel
- Works: The Fox in the Chicken Coop, Sallah, Blaumilch Canal, The Policeman, Ideologie für den Hausgebrauch
- Endre Antal Miksa DeToth, better known as Andre DeToth (May 15, 1913–October 27, 2002), was a Hungarian-American film director, born and raised in Makó, Csanád County, Austria-Hungary. He directed the 3D film House of Wax, despite being unable to see in 3D himself, having lost an eye at an early age. Upon naturalization as a United States citizen in 1945, he took Endre Antal Miksa DeToth as his legal name.
- Birthplace: Hungary, Makó, Csongrád
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Morgan, the Pirate, Pitfall, Young Widow, Two Girls on the Street
- Istvan Szabo has emerged as one of the most important Hungarian filmmakers of the 20th Century. The Central European experience, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Warsaw Pact, is the key to the content of his films as well as their symbolic structure. There may even be an implied metaphor in a film like "Colonel Redl" (1985) between the complex social atmosphere and political issues in the old imperial dynasty and the modern people's republic. His output perhaps reached a culmination in 1999 with the epic "Sunshine," which followed the rise and fall of a Jewish Hungarian family from the late 19th Century to the mid-1960s.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Mephisto, Sunshine, Colonel Redl, The Door, Sweet Emma
- Hermann Julius Oberth (German: [ˈhɛrman ˈjuːli̯ʊs ˈoːbɛrt]; 25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, along with the French Robert Esnault-Pelterie, the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert Goddard.
- Birthplace: Sibiu, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Romania
- Works: Woman in the Moon, The Moon Car, Man Into Space, The Electric Spaceship, Primer for Those Who Would Govern
- As one of the highest-paid and most notorious writers in 1990s Hollywood, Joe Eszterhas became that rare modern screenwriter who was able to lay claim to achieving auteur status. With plots that tended to focus on love and betrayal, Eszterhas made his debut with "F.I.S.T." (1978). He had his first major hit with the memorable "Flashdance" (1983), before tackling more mature fare like "Betrayed" (1988) and "Music Box" (1989). But Eszterhas achieved a great deal of infamy with his most successful movie, the erotic thriller "Basic Instinct" (1992), which he sold for a whopping $3 million and pushed the envelope on sexual content. He continued to explore the facets of eroticism with "Sliver" (199) and "Jade" (1995).
- Birthplace: Csákánydoroszló, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Flashdance, Sliver, Jagged Edge
- Ferenc Molnár (US: FERR-ents MOHL-nar, -ənts -, - MAWL-, Hungarian: [ˈfɛrɛnt͡s ˈmolnaːr]; born Ferenc Neumann; 12 January 1878 – 1 April 1952), often anglicized as Franz Molnar, was a Hungarian-born author, stage-director, dramatist, and poet, widely regarded as Hungary’s most celebrated and controversial playwright. His primary aim through his writing was to entertain by transforming his personal experiences into literary works of art. He was never connected to any one literary movement but he did utilize the precepts of Naturalism, Neo-Romanticism, Expressionism, and the Freudian psychoanalytical concepts, but only as long as they suited his desires. “By fusing the realistic narrative and stage tradition of Hungary with Western influences into a cosmopolitan amalgam, Molnár emerged as a versatile artist whose style was uniquely his own.” As a novelist, Molnár may best be remembered for The Paul Street Boys, the story of two rival gangs of youths in Budapest. It has been translated into fourteen languages and adapted for the stage and film. It has been considered a masterpiece by many. It was, however, as a playwright that he made his greatest contribution and how he is best known internationally. "In his graceful, whimsical, sophisticated drawing-room comedies, he provided a felicitous synthesis of Naturalism and fantasy, Realism and Romanticism, cynicism and sentimentality, the profane and the sublime." Out of his many plays, The Devil, Liliom, The Swan, The Guardsman and The Play's the Thing endure as classics. He was influenced by the likes of Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann. He immigrated to the United States to escape persecution of Hungarian Jews during World War II and later adopted American citizenship. Molnár’s plays continue to be relevant and are performed all over the world. His national and international fame has inspired many Hungarian playwrights including Elemér Boross, László Fodor, Lajos Bíró, László Bús-Fekete, Ernő Vajda, Attila Orbók, and Imre Földes, among others.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Tales of Manhattan, Golddigger, Csendélet, Das Lamm, Der Pelz
- György Lukács (also Georg Lukács; born György Bernát Löwinger; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution. As a literary critic Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was appointed the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).Lukács has been described as the preeminent Marxist intellectual of the Stalinist era, though assessing his legacy can be difficult as Lukács seemed both to support Stalinism as the embodiment of Marxist thought, and yet also to champion a return to pre-Stalinist Marxism.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Marxism and human liberation, Intimna drama, Lukaqi wen xue lun wen ji, Marx's basic ontological principles, Pensée vécue
- Ivan Tors was a Hungarian producer, writer, director, and actor who was known for producing "The Glass Wall," "Namu, the Killer Whale," and "Flipper's New Adventure."
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: In the Good Old Summertime, That Forsyte Woman, Gog, Watch the Birdie, The Glass Wall
- Henry Lehrman (March 30, 1881 – November 7, 1946) was an American actor, screenwriter, director and producer. Lehrman was a very prominent figure of Hollywood's silent film era, working with such cinematic pioneers as D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. However, he is primarily remembered today not for his own achievements, but for three biographical facts: he had directed, as well as co-starred in, Charlie Chaplin's very first film, Making a Living (though Chaplin and he didn't get along); he was notoriously careless of the safety of the actors who worked for him; and he was the lover of the actress Virginia Rappe, for whose death Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, in a highly-publicized series of trials, was accused, and later acquitted, of manslaughter.
- Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
- Nationality: United States of America
- Works: Kid Auto Races at Venice, Mabel's Strange Predicament
- Otto von Habsburg (20 November 1912 – 4 July 2011), also known by his traditional royal title of Archduke Otto of Austria, was the last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary from 1916 until the dissolution of the empire in 1919, a realm which comprised modern-day Austria, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and parts of Italy, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. He became the pretender to the former thrones, Head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, and Sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1922, upon the death of his father. He resigned as Sovereign of the Golden Fleece in 2000 and as head of the Imperial House in 2007. The eldest son of Charles I and IV, the last Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, and his wife, Zita of Bourbon-Parma, Otto was born as third in line to the thrones, as Archduke Otto of Austria, Royal Prince of Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia. With his father's accession to the thrones in 1916, he was likely to become emperor and king. As his father never abdicated, Otto was considered by himself, his family and Austro-Hungarian legitimists to be the rightful emperor-king from 1922.Otto was active on the Austrian and European political stage from the 1930s, both by promoting the cause of Habsburg restoration and as an early proponent of European integration—being thoroughly disgusted with nationalism—and a fierce opponent of Nazism and communism. He has been described as one of the leaders of the Austrian Resistance. After the 1938 Anschluss, where monarchists were severely persecuted in Austria and sentenced to death by the Nazis, Otto fled Europe to the United States. Otto von Habsburg was Vice President (1957–1973) and President (1973–2004) of the International Paneuropean Union, and served as a Member of the European Parliament for the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) from 1979 to 1999. As a newly elected Member of the European Parliament in 1979, Otto had an empty chair set up for the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain in the European Parliament, and took a strong interest in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Otto von Habsburg played a notable role in the revolutions of 1989, as a co-initiator of the Pan-European Picnic. Later he was a strong supporter of the EU membership of central and eastern European countries. A noted intellectual, he published several books on historical and political affairs. Otto has been described as one of the "architects of the European idea and of European integration" together with Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide De Gasperi.Otto was exiled in 1919 and grew up mostly in Spain. His devout Catholic mother raised him according to the old curriculum of Austria-Hungary, preparing him to become a Catholic monarch. During his life in exile, he lived in Switzerland, Madeira, Spain, Belgium, France, the United States, and from 1954 until his death, finally in Bavaria (Germany), in the residence Villa Austria. At the time of his death, he was a citizen of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia,having earlier been stateless de jure and de facto, and possessed passports of Monaco, the Order of Malta, and Spain. In 1961, he was offered the crown of Spain by Francisco Franco. He refused, and Juan Carlos of the House of Bourbon was made Franco's successor instead. His funeral took place at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna on 16 July 2011; he was entombed in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna and his heart buried in Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary.
- Birthplace: Reichenau an der Rax, Austria
- Nationality: Austria, Hungary, Germany, Croatia
- Works: Charles V, Europa im Umbruch, Le nouveau défi européen, Die Reichsidee, Otto von Habsburg: ein Kampf um Osterreich; 1938-1945
- Theodor Herzl (; German: [ˈhɛɐtsl̩]; Hebrew: תֵּאוֹדוֹר הֶרְצְל Te'odor Hertsel; Hungarian: Herzl Tivadar; Hebrew name given at his brit milah Binyamin Ze'ev (Hebrew: בִּנְיָמִין זְאֵב), also known in Hebrew as חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה, Chozeh HaMedinah, lit. "Visionary of the State"; 2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state. Though he died before its establishment, he is known as the father of the State of Israel. While Herzl is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State", i.e. the visionary who gave a concrete, practicable platform and framework to political Zionism, he was not the first Zionist theoretician or activist; scholars, many of them religious such as rabbis Yehuda Bibas, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Judah Alkalai, promoted a range of proto-Zionist ideas before him.
- Birthplace: Pest, Hungary, Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary
- Works: The Old New Land, Die treibende Kraft, Der Judenstaat, Theodor Herzl, Complete diaries
- Hungarian director Miklos Jancso gained international recognition in the late 1960s, when "The Round-up" (1966), "The Red and The White" (1967) and "The Confrontation" (1969) garnered numerous awards at a variety of international film festivals. Displaying evidence of a developing revolutionary vision and uniquely formalistic cinematic style, these films not only established Jancso's reputation as an auteur, but also helped to serve notice to the world that Hungarian filmmaking had entered into a dynamic new era.
- Birthplace: Vac, Hungary
- Nationality: People's Republic of Hungary, Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: The Red and the White, The Round-Up, Hungarian Rhapsody, The Lord's Lantern in Budapest, Hungary 2011
- Paul Czinner (30 May 1890 – 22 June 1972) was a Hungarian-born British writer, film director, and producer.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria, Hungary
- Works: Mélo, The Bolshoi Ballet, Jealousy
- Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the title. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and his wife Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and for his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality. Teller was born in Hungary and emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. He was an early member of the Manhattan Project, charged with developing the first atomic bomb; during this time he made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons as well, but these were deferred until after World War II. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and was both its director and associate director for many years. In his later years, Teller became especially known for his advocacy of controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot. He was a vigorous advocate of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics, The pursuit of simplicity, Better a shield than a sword, The reluctant revolutionary, Nuclear energy in the developing world
- Ágnes Heller (12 May 1929 – 19 July 2019) was a Hungarian philosopher and lecturer. She was a core member of the Budapest School philosophical forum in the 1960s and later taught political theory for 25 years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She lived, wrote and lectured in Budapest.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Die Auferstehung des jüdischen Jesus, A theory of feelings, Una Revision De La Teoria De Las Necesidades, An ethics of personality, Beyond Justice
- Felix Salten (German: [ˈzaltn̩]; 6 September 1869 – 8 October 1945) was an Austrian author and critic in Vienna. His most famous work is Bambi, a Life in the Woods (1923).
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria, Hungary
- Works: The Shaggy Dog [1959], The Shaggy D.A., Bambi, a Life in the Woods, Josephine Mutzenbacher
- The Hungarian-born John Alton, who emigrated to the USA in 1919, shot his first films in Argentina in the 1930s and began his prolific Hollywood career with "The Courageous Dr. Christian" (1940), directed by Bernard Vorhaus. He demonstrated a masterful command of chiaroscuro, the representation of light and shade without regard to color, with his work for Anthony Mann, notably "T-Men" (1947) and "Border Incident" (1949). Alton became known as a master of film noir, as well for his visual puns, usually involving shadows.
- Birthplace: Sopron, Austria-Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Puerta cerrada
- Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála "Emmuska" Orczy de Orci (; 23 September 1865 – 12 November 1947) was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright. She is best known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the alter ego of Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop who turns into a quick-thinking escape artist in order to save ill-fated French royalty from "Madame Guillotine" during the French revolution, establishing the "hero with a secret identity" into popular culture.Opening in London's West End on 5 January 1905, The Scarlet Pimpernel became a favourite of British audiences. Some of Orczy's paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. During World War I, she formed the Women of England's Active Service League, an unofficial organisation aimed at encouraging women to persuade men to volunteer for active service in the armed forces.
- Birthplace: Heves County, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, United Kingdom
- Works: The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Emperor's Candlesticks, A Child of the Revolution
- George Tabori (24 May 1914 – 23 July 2007) was a Hungarian writer and theater director.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: I Confess, Secret Ceremony, Privet! Hallo!, 1 Übungscassette, No Exit
- Gábor Csupó ( GAH-bor CHOO-poh, Hungarian: [ˈɡaːbor ˈtʃupoː]; born September 29, 1952) is a Hungarian-born American animator, writer, director, producer and graphic designer. He is co-founder of the animation studio Klasky Csupo, which has produced shows like Rugrats, Duckman, and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: People's Republic of Hungary, United States of America, Hungary
- Works: All Growed Up
- George Soros, born on August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary, is a renowned financier, philanthropist, and political activist. His journey to fame and fortune began when he fled Hungary during the Second World War and resettled in England. There, he attended the London School of Economics, where he was deeply influenced by philosopher Karl Popper's ideas about open societies. Upon his graduation in 1952, he entered the world of finance and started carving out an illustrious career in investment banking. Soros, often dubbed as "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England," made headlines in 1992, when he bet against the British pound and generated a profit of $1 billion overnight in an event known as Black Wednesday. This audacious move solidified Soros's status as one of the world's most astute currency traders. In 1973, he founded the hedge fund company, Soros Fund Management, which went on to become one of the most successful firms in the industry, pushing his net worth into the billions. However, Soros's impact extends beyond the realm of finance. He channelled a significant portion of his wealth into philanthropic endeavours, primarily through the Open Society Foundations. These organizations support projects in education, public health, and civil liberties in more than 120 countries worldwide. As a political activist, Soros has been a vocal critic of various international policies and has used his influence to advocate for changes. He has also authored several books on topics such as global capitalism, geopolitics, and open societies, further demonstrating his multifaceted persona.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve
- Géza von Bolváry (full name Géza Maria von Bolváry-Zahn; 26 December 1897 – 10 August 1961) was a Hungarian actor, screenwriter and film director, who worked principally in Germany and Austria.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria, Germany, Hungary
- Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (German: [ɪˈɡnaːts ˈzɛml̩vaɪs]; Hungarian: Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician of ethnic-German ancestry, now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "saviour of mothers", Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal. Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was treacherously committed to an asylum by his colleague, where he died at age 47 after being beaten by the guards, from a gangrenous wound, due to an infection on his right hand which might have been caused by the beating (officially of pyaemia), only 14 days after he was committed. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practised and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success.
- Birthplace: Buda
- Nationality: Austria, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever
- Márta Mészáros (born 19 September 1931) is a Hungarian screenwriter and film director. The daughter of László Mészáros, a sculptor, Mészáros began her career working in documentary film, having made 25 documentary shorts over the span of ten years. Her full-length directorial debut, Eltavozott nap/The Girl (1968), was the first Hungarian film to have been directed by a woman, and won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Valladolid International Film Festival.Mészáros' work often combines autobiographical details with documentary footage. Prominent themes include characters' denials of their pasts, the consequences of dishonesty, and the problematics of gender. Her films often feature heroines from fragmented families, such as young girls seeking their missing parents (The Girl) or middle-aged women looking to adopt children (Adoption).Although Mészáros has made over fifteen feature films, she is arguably best known for Diary for My Children (1984), which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first entry in a trilogy of autobiographical films which also includes Diary for My Lovers (1987) and Diary for My Mother and Father (1990). Throughout her career, Mészáros has won the Golden Bear and the Silver Bear awards at the Berlinale; the Golden Medal at the Chicago International Film Festival; the Silver Shell at the San Sebastian International Film Festival; and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1991 she was a member of the jury at the 17th Moscow International Film Festival.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: The Heiresses, Fetus, Adoption, Just like Home, The Unburied Man
- Béla Tarr (born 21 July 1955) is a Hungarian filmmaker. His body of work consists mainly of art films with philosophical themes and long takes. Debuting with the film Family Nest (1979), Tarr began his directorial career with a brief period of what he refers to as "social cinema", aimed at telling mundane stories about ordinary people, often in the style of cinema vérité. Over the next decade, the cinematic style and thematic elements of his films changed. Tarr has been interpreted as having a pessimistic view of humanity; the characters in his works are often cynical, and have tumultuous relationships with one another in ways critics have found to be darkly comic. Almanac of Fall (1984), his only color film, follows the inhabitants of a run-down apartment as they struggle to live together while sharing their hostilities. The drama Damnation (1988) was lauded for its languid and controlled camera movement, which Tarr would become known for internationally. Satan's Tango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) continued his bleak and desolate representations of reality, while incorporating apocalyptic overtones; the former sometimes appears in scholarly polls of the greatest films ever made, and the latter received wide acclaim from critics. Tarr would later compete in the 2007 Cannes Film Festival with his film The Man from London, which opened to moderately positive reviews. Frequent collaborators with Tarr include novelist László Krasznahorkai, film composer Mihály Víg, cinematographer Fred Kelemen, actress Erika Bók, and Tarr's wife Ágnes Hranitzky, who is sometimes credited as a co-director of his last three works. After the release of his film The Turin Horse (2011), which made many year-end "best-of" critics' lists, Tarr announced his definitive retirement from feature-length film direction. In February 2013 he started a film school in Sarajevo, known as film.factory, leaving in 2016. He has since premiered two short films in a 2017 Amsterdam exhibition.
- Birthplace: Pécs, Hungary
- Nationality: People's Republic of Hungary, Hungary
- Works: Werckmeister Harmonies, Satantango, The Turin Horse, The Man from London, Damnation
- Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in 1874, was a Hungarian-American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor, and film producer renowned for his sensational escape acts. His early life was marked by poverty, as he was one of seven children born to a Rabbi and his wife who immigrated to the United States from Hungary. Yet, despite these humble beginnings, he would go on to become one of the most famous performers of the 20th century. Houdini's illustrious career began with card tricks before he ventured into escape acts which earned him international acclaim. With an uncanny ability to escape from seemingly impossible situations, including handcuffs, straightjackets underwater, and sealed milk cans, he came to be known as "The Handcuff King". Notably, he also debunked spiritualists as part of his act, exposing frauds that claimed to have supernatural powers. This aspect of his career demonstrated his commitment to the truth behind the illusion, making him not just an entertainer but a crusader against deception. In addition to his stage performances, Houdini made significant contributions to the world of cinema. He acted in several films and founded his own film production company. Despite his death in 1926 from peritonitis, his legacy continues to thrive. Houdini's influence is prominent in the sphere of magic and performance artistry, with his daring stunts and imaginative performances setting the bar for future generations. His life story serves as a testament to his tenacity, creativity, and enduring appeal.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Mysterious Mr. Yu, or, Haldane of the Secret Service, The Unmasking Of Robert Houndin, America's sensational perplexer!
- Theodor "Teddy" Kollek (Hebrew: טדי קולק; 27 May 1911 – 2 January 2007) was an Israeli politician who served as the mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993, and founder of the Jerusalem Foundation. Kollek was re-elected five times, in 1969, 1973, 1978, 1983 and 1989. After reluctantly running for a seventh term in 1993 at the age of 82, he lost to Likud candidate and future Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert. During his tenure, Jerusalem developed into a modern city, especially after its reunification in 1967. He was once called "the greatest builder of Jerusalem since Herod."
- Birthplace: Nagyvázsony, Hungary
- Nationality: Israel
- Works: The Jerusalem Anthology, For Jerusalem, Yerushalayim shel Ṭedi, Pilgrims to the Holy Land
János Mattis-Teutsch
Dec. at 75 (1884-1960)János Mattis-Teutsch or Máttis-Teutsch, Mátis-Teutsch (IPA: [ˈjaːnoʃ ˈmɒtːiʃ ˈtʰɔʏ̯t͡ʃ]; the most common Hungarian-language versions of his name, all of which have also been spelled without the hyphen; his first name has been rendered as Hans or Johannes in German and Ioan in Romanian; 13 August 1884–17 March 1960) was a Hungarian painter, sculptor, graphic artist, art critic, and poet. Best known for his Seelenblumen ("Soulflowers") cycle of paintings, he was an important contributor to the development of modern art and avant-garde trends inside Romania (where he spent the larger part of his life). He was the grandfather of the artist Waldemar Mattis-Teutsch.- Birthplace: Brașov, Centru, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Romania
- Zoltan Korda (June 3, 1895 – October 13, 1961) was a Hungarian-born motion picture screenwriter, director and producer. He made his first film in Hungary in 1918, and worked with his brother Alexander Korda on film-making there and in London. They both moved to the United States in 1940 to Hollywood and the American film industry.
- Birthplace: Túrkeve, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, England
- George Kaczender (19 April 1933 – 24 August 2016) was a Hungarian-born Canadian film director. He directed 26 films between 1963 and 2001.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Canada, United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Tango Dancer
- Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner (Hungarian: Wigner Jenő Pál; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".A graduate of the Technical University of Berlin, Wigner worked as an assistant to Karl Weissenberg and Richard Becker at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen. Wigner and Hermann Weyl were responsible for introducing group theory into physics, particularly the theory of symmetry in physics. Along the way he performed ground-breaking work in pure mathematics, in which he authored a number of mathematical theorems. In particular, Wigner's theorem is a cornerstone in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. He is also known for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus. In 1930, Princeton University recruited Wigner, along with John von Neumann, and he moved to the United States. Wigner participated in a meeting with Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein that resulted in the Einstein-Szilard letter, which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs. Wigner was afraid that the German nuclear weapon project would develop an atomic bomb first. During the Manhattan Project, he led a team whose task was to design nuclear reactors to convert uranium into weapons grade plutonium. At the time, reactors existed only on paper, and no reactor had yet gone critical. Wigner was disappointed that DuPont was given responsibility for the detailed design of the reactors, not just their construction. He became Director of Research and Development at the Clinton Laboratory (now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory) in early 1946, but became frustrated with bureaucratic interference by the Atomic Energy Commission, and returned to Princeton. In the postwar period he served on a number of government bodies, including the National Bureau of Standards from 1947 to 1951, the mathematics panel of the National Research Council from 1951 to 1954, the physics panel of the National Science Foundation, and the influential General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1952 to 1957 and again from 1959 to 1964. In later life, he became more philosophical, and published The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, his best-known work outside technical mathematics and physics.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria, United States of America, Hungary
- Works: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays, Group Theory and its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra, The Magnitude of the Eta Effect, Effect of the Temperature of the Moderator on the Velocity Distribution of Neutrons with Numerical Calculations for H as Moderator
- Edmund Josef von Horváth (9 December 1901 Sušak, Rijeka, then in Austria–Hungary, now in Croatia – 1 June 1938 Paris) was a German-writing Austro-Hungarian-born playwright and novelist. He preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von Horváth.
- Birthplace: Rijeka, Croatia
- Nationality: Austria, Hungary
- Works: Ein lesebuch, Die Romane, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Faith, Hope
- Franz Joseph I or Francis Joseph I (German: Franz Joseph I.; 18 August 1830 – 21 November 1916) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 2 December 1848 to his death. From 1 May 1850 to 24 August 1866 he was also President of the German Confederation. He was the longest-reigning Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, as well as the third-longest-reigning monarch of any country in European history, after Louis XIV of France and Johann II of Liechtenstein.In December 1848, Emperor Ferdinand abdicated the throne at Olomouc, as part of Minister President Felix zu Schwarzenberg's plan to end the Revolutions of 1848 in Hungary. This allowed Ferdinand's nephew Franz Joseph to accede to the throne. Largely considered to be a reactionary, Franz Joseph spent his early reign resisting constitutionalism in his domains. The Austrian Empire was forced to cede its influence over Tuscany and most of its claim to Lombardy–Venetia to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, following the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859 and the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866. Although Franz Joseph ceded no territory to the Kingdom of Prussia after the Austrian defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, the Peace of Prague (23 August 1866) settled the German Question in favour of Prussia, which prevented the Unification of Germany from occurring under the House of Habsburg.Franz Joseph was troubled by nationalism during his entire reign. He concluded the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which granted greater autonomy to Hungary and transformed the Austrian Empire into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. He ruled peacefully for the next 45 years, but personally suffered the tragedies of the execution of his brother, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, the suicide of his only son and heir-apparent, Crown Prince Rudolf, in 1889, the assassination of his wife, Empress Elisabeth, in 1898, and the assassination of his nephew and heir-presumptive, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914. After the Austro-Prussian War, Austria-Hungary turned its attention to the Balkans, which was a hotspot of international tension because of conflicting interests with the Russian Empire. The Bosnian Crisis was a result of Franz Joseph's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, which had been occupied by his troops since the Congress of Berlin (1878). On 28 June 1914, the assassination of his nephew and heir-presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo resulted in Austria-Hungary's declaration of war against the Kingdom of Serbia, which was Russia's ally. That activated a system of alliances which resulted in World War I. Franz Joseph died on 21 November 1916, after ruling his domains for almost 68 years as one of the longest-reigning monarchs in modern history. He was succeeded by his grandnephew Charles.
- Birthplace: Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, Austria
- Nationality: Austrian Empire, Austria-Hungary
- Works: The incredible friendship
- Paul Erdős (Hungarian: Erdős Pál [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a renowned Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. He was known both for his social practice of mathematics (he engaged more than 500 collaborators) and for his eccentric lifestyle (Time magazine called him The Oddball's Oddball). He devoted his waking hours to mathematics, even into his later years—indeed, his death came only hours after he solved a geometry problem at a conference in Warsaw. Erdős pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. He championed and contributed to Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions in which order necessarily appears. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics. Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed. He firmly believed mathematics to be a social activity, living an itinerant lifestyle with the sole purpose of writing mathematical papers with other mathematicians. Erdős's prolific output with co-authors prompted the creation of the Erdős number, the number of steps in the shortest path between a mathematician and Erdős in terms of co-authorships.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, United Kingdom, Israel
- Works: Old and new problems and results in combinatorial number theory
- Ján Kadár (1 April 1918 – 1 June 1979) was a Hungarian-born Slovak film writer and director of Jewish heritage. As a filmmaker, he worked in Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Canada. Most of his films were directed in tandem with Elmar Klos. The two became best known for their Oscar-winning The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965). As a professor at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague, Kadár trained most of the directors who spawned the Czechoslovak New Wave in the 1960s. After moving to the United States, he became professor of film direction at the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills. His personal life as well as his films encompassed and spanned a range of cultures: Jewish, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, and American.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Slovakia, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: The Shop on Main Street, Adrift, Magic Lantern II
- John Halas (born János Halász; 16 April 1912 – 21 January 1995) was a pioneering Hungarian animator. Together with Gyula Macskássy (an acquaintance from Sándor Bortnyik's Bauhaus art studio, Műhely), and Félix Kassowitz, Halász co-founded Hungary's first animation studio, Coloriton, in 1932. Coloriton existed for 4 years, producing high-quality promotion-oriented animations for television and cinema including Boldog király kincse ("The Treasure of the Joyful King"). Halász learned his craft under George Pal, but launched his own career in 1934, and two years later moved to England where later, with his wife Joy Batchelor, founded Halas and Batchelor in 1940.Over the years they made over 70 short subjects during the war, using propaganda from the time. Their best-known film, Animal Farm (1954), was the first full-length animated film made in Great Britain. They also produced the animated TV series Snip and Snap (1960) and the famous music video Love Is All by Roger Glover. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Festival of Animated Film - Animafest Zagreb in 1990. Halas died on 21 January 1995, aged 83.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, England
- Works: Animal Farm, History of the Cinema, Automania 2000, Children and Cars, The Hoffnung Palm Court Orchestra
- Károly Makk (December 22, 1925 – August 30, 2017) was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. Five of his films were nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival; however, he won lesser awards at Cannes and elsewhere. He was born in Berettyóújfalu, Hungary. In 1973 he was a member of the jury at the 8th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1980, he was a member of the jury at the 30th Berlin International Film Festival. His film A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda (2003) was entered into the 25th Moscow International Film Festival. From September 27, 2011, he was the president of the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts.
- Birthplace: Berettyóújfalu, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Another Way, Cats' Play, The Last Manuscript, Let's Love One Another, A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda
- György (George) Konrád (born 2 April 1933) is a Hungarian novelist and essayist, known as an advocate of individual freedom.
- Birthplace: Berettyóújfalu, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Road of the Intellectuals to Class Power, Csodafigurák, Die Erweiterung der Mitte, A feast in the garden, The Case Worker
- Miklós Nyiszli (17 June 1901, Szilágysomlyó, Austria-Hungary – 5 May 1956, Oradea, Romania) was a Jewish prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered himself as a doctor and was sent to work at number 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help the ill with only the most basic medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, an SS officer and physician. Mengele decided after observing Nyiszli's skills to move him to a specially built autopsy and operating theatre. The room had been built inside Crematorium II (Crematorium I being in Auschwitz Town camp), and Nyiszli, along with members of the 12th Sonderkommando, was housed there.
- Birthplace: Șimleu Silvaniei, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Romania
- Works: Auschwitz
- Dezső Kosztolányi (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈdɛʒøː ˈkostolaːɲi]; March 29, 1885 – November 3, 1936) was a Hungarian poet and prose-writer.
- Birthplace: Subotica, Serbia
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Skylark, Anna Édes, Nero, the Bloody Poet, Kornél Esti
- Peter Kassovitz is a French director, writer, producer, and actor who is known for directing "Jakob the Liar" and "Au bout du bout du banc." Kassovitz was nominated for a César Award in 1979 for "Jeudi 7 avril."
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Jakob the Liar
- Ivan Yakovych Franko (Ukrainian: Іван Якович Франко, pronounced [iˈvɑn ˈjɑkovɪtʃ frɐnˈkɔ]) (August 27 [O.S. August 15] 1856 – May 28 [O.S. May 15] 1916) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, interpreter, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, ethnographer, and the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language. He was a political radical, and a founder of the socialist and nationalist movement in western Ukraine. In addition to his own literary work, he also translated the works of such renowned figures as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante Alighieri, Victor Hugo, Adam Mickiewicz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller into Ukrainian. His translations appeared on the stage of the Ruska Besida Theatre. Along with Taras Shevchenko, he has had a tremendous impact on modern literary and political thought in Ukraine.
- Birthplace: Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary
- Works: Boa constrictor, and other stories, Sotvorennia Svitu, Basis of Society, Lys Mykyta
- Károly Lajthay (7 December 1883 – 30 August 1946) was a Hungarian film director, actor and screenwriter. He directed 17 films between 1918 and 1944. He also appeared in 13 films between 1916 and 1920. He was born in Marosvásárhely, Austria-Hungary (now Târgu Mureş, Romania). He directed the first film version of Dracula entitled Drakula halála (1923). Lajthay died in Budapest, Hungary.
- Birthplace: Târgu Mureș, Romania
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary, Romania
- Works: Dracula's Death
- Hans Habe (February 12, 1911, Budapest – September 29, 1977, Locarno) was a Hungarian and American writer and newspaper publisher. From 1941, he held United States citizenship. He was also known by such pseudonyms as Antonio Corte, Frank Richard, Frederick Gert, John Richler, Hans Wolfgang, and Alexander Holmes".
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria, Hungary
- Works: The mission, The devil's agent, Agent of the devil, Weg ins Dunkel, Im Jahre Null
- Imre Nagy (Hungarian: [ˈimrɛ ˈnɒɟ]; 7 June 1896 – 16 June 1958) was a Hungarian communist politician who served as Prime Minister and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic from 1953 to 1955 and in 1956 Nagy became leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet-backed government, for which he was executed two years later. Nagy was a devout communist functionary since the Russian Revolution and served the Soviet NKVD secret police as an informer from 1933 to 1941, denouncing over 200 colleagues, who were then purged and arrested and 15 of whom were executed. He served in various offices as the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) took control of Hungary in the late 1940s after World War II and the country entered the Soviet sphere of influence. He played a key role in the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of German-speaking Hungarians from 1945 to 1946 as Interior Minister of Hungary. Nagy became Chairman in 1953 and attempted to relax some of harshest aspects of Mátyás Rákosi's Stalinist regime, but was subverted and eventually forced out of the government in 1955 by Rákosi's continuing influence as General Secretary of the MDP. Nagy remained popular with writers, intellectuals, and the common people, who saw him as an icon of reform against the hard-line elements in the Soviet-backed regime. The outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution on 23 October 1956 saw Nagy elevated to the position of Prime Minister on 24 October as a central demand of the revolutionaries and common people. Nagy's reformist faction gained full control of the government, admitted non-communist politicians, dissolved the ÁVH secret police, promised democratic reforms, and unilaterally withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact on 1 November. The Soviet Union launched a massive military invasion of Hungary on 4 November, forcibly deposing Nagy who fled to the Embassy of Yugoslavia in Budapest. Nagy was lured out of the Embassy under false promises on 22 November but was arrested and deported to Romania. On 16 June 1958, Nagy was tried and executed for treason alongside his closest allies, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave. In June 1989, Nagy and other prominent figures of the 1956 Revolution were rehabilitated and reburied with full honours, an event that played a key role in the collapse of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party regime.
- Birthplace: Kaposvár, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: The activity of the Government during the past six months and the tasks for 1954, On communism, in defense of the new course
- Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (; French: [nikɔla saʁkɔzi] (listen); born 28 January 1955) is a retired French politician who served as President of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra from 16 May 2007 until 15 May 2012. Born in Paris, he is of 1/2 Hungarian Protestant, 1/4 Greek Jewish, and 1/4 French Catholic origin. Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine from 1983 to 2002, he was Minister of the Budget under Prime Minister Édouard Balladur (1993–1995) during François Mitterrand's second term. During Jacques Chirac's second presidential term he served as Minister of the Interior and as Minister of Finances. He was the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party from 2004 to 2007. He won the 2007 French presidential election by a 53.1% to 46.9% margin to Socialist Ségolène Royal. During his term, he faced the late-2000s financial crisis (causing a recession and the European sovereign debt crisis) and the Arab Spring (especially in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria). He initiated the reform of French universities (2007) and the pension reform (2010). He married Italian-French singer-songwriter Carla Bruni in 2008 at the Élysée Palace in Paris. In the 2012 election, François Hollande, candidate of the Socialist Party, defeated Sarkozy by a 3.2% margin. After leaving the presidential office, Sarkozy vowed to retire from public life before coming back in 2014, being subsequently reelected as UMP leader (renamed The Republicans in 2015). Being defeated at the Republican presidential primary in 2016, he retired from public life. He is currently charged with corruption by French prosecutors in two cases, notably concerning the alleged Libyan interference in the 2007 French elections.
- Birthplace: France, Paris
- Nationality: France, Hungary
- Works: Testimony: France in the Twenty-First Century
- János Pilinszky (25 November 1921 in Budapest – 27 May 1981 in Budapest) was one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the 20th century. Well known within the Hungarian borders for his vast influence on postwar Hungarian poetry, Pilinszky’s style includes a juxtaposition of Roman Catholic faith and intellectual disenchantment. His poetry often focuses on the underlying sensations of life and death; his time as a prisoner of war during the Second World War and later his life under the communist dictatorship furthered his isolation and estrangement. Born in a family of intellectuals in 1921, Pilinszky went on to study Hungarian literature, law, and art history at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 1938. Although he failed to complete his studies, it was during this same year that his first works of poetry were published in several varying literary journals. In 1944 he was drafted into the army; his unit being ordered to follow the retreating German allies, he arrived at Harbach, a small village in Germany, after a march of several weeks. Adrift in Germany, he witnessed several camps before he could return to Hungary after the end of the war, most notably the Ravensbrück concentration camp. What he saw in the camps was an experience he never forgot and later commemorated in a great number of poems, most notably, KZ-oratórium ("KZ oratory"), Ravensbrücki passió ("Passion of Ravensbrück"), Harbach 1944, etc. Following the publication of his first body of work in 1946, Trapéz és korlát ("Trapeze and Bars"), he was awarded the Baumgarten Prize in 1947. While Trapéz és korlát consists of only 18 poems, it established Pilinszky as a major poetic force in Hungary. His next publication, 1959’s Harmadnapon ("On the third day"), was not released for over 10 years as a result of his being labeled “pessimistic” by the ruling Hungarian Communist Party in the 1950s. Harmadnapon contains his poem Apokrif ("Apocrypha"), considered his chef-d'oeuvre, which many see as one of the highest peaks of Hungarian poetry. The poem has the return of the prodigal son to his parents in its center, and summarises Pilinszky's poetic world from his experiences in the lagers to his alienation and the painful absence of God from the world. From 1960 to 1970, he traveled the United States and Europe taking part in several poetry readings. In 1971 he was awarded the József Attila Prize for his collection entitled Nagyvárosi ikonok ("Metropolitan Icons"). His monumental and visionary poems gave way to short, epigrammatic verses over time. 1972 saw the publication of Szálkák ("Splinters"), followed by Végkifejlet ("Dénouement") in 1974. His last collection, Kráter ("Crater") was published in 1975, containing both new poems and the majority of his rather short, but extremely substantial and concise oeuvre rearranged in cycles. He was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1980 before returning to Budapest where he died of a heart attack in 1981. Pilinszky lead a very reserved private life. Eventually, he married a French woman, Ingrid Ficheux, 11 months before his death. His poems were translated into several languages; most notably, his English translator was Ted Hughes (in collaboration with János Csokits), while most French translations were made by his friend Pierre Emmanuel.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Mrs. Dery Where Are You?, Síremlék-Pilinszky János színművének, Aranymadár, Ahol kialszik a világ, The desert of love
- György Pálfi (born 11 April 1974 in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian filmmaker. His film Taxidermia was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.Pálfi's films have received numerous awards and nominations. At the 2002 European Film Awards, he won the European Discovery/Fassbinder Award for his début film Hukkle. At Les Arcs European Film Festival in 2014, Pálfi won the first annual ARTE International Prize for the best project in development, The Voice, about a son searching for his father, a scientist who went missing 30 years ago.Two of Pálfi's films have been Hungary's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: Hukkle and Taxidermia. He is a TorinoFilmLab Script&Pitch participant with his project The Voice.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Hukkle, Taxidermia, I Am Not Your Friend, Hungary 2011, Final Cut: Ladies And Gentlemen
Gyula Illyés
Dec. at 80 (1902-1983)Gyula Illyés (2 November 1902 – 15 April 1983) was a Hungarian poet and novelist. He was one of the so-called népi ("from the people") writers, named so because they aimed to show – propelled by strong sociological interest and left-wing convictions – the disadvantageous conditions of their native land.- Birthplace: Tolna County, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Fáklyaláng, Malom a Séden, Kegyenc, A képzelt beteg, A különc
- Charles Simonyi (; Hungarian: Simonyi Károly, pronounced [ˈʃimoɲi ˈkaːroj]; born September 10, 1948) is a Hungarian-born American software architect. He started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office suite of applications. He founded and led Intentional Software (acquired by Microsoft in 2017), with the aim of developing and marketing his concept of intentional programming. In April 2007, aboard Soyuz TMA-10, he became the fifth space tourist and the second Hungarian in space. In March 2009, aboard Soyuz TMA-14, he made a second trip to the International Space Station. His estimated net worth is US$3.3 billion.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Meta-programming
- Ernest Vajda (born Ernő Vajda; 27 May 1886 in Komárno, Austria-Hungary, today Slovakia – 3 April 1954 in Woodland Hills, California) was a Hungarian actor, playwright and novelist, but is more famous today for his screenplays. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Smilin' Through (1932), based on the hit play by Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin. Vajda also wrote the screenplay for the first film version of Rudolph Besier's The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934).
- Birthplace: Komárno, Slovakia
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: The Merry Widow, The Smiling Lieutenant, A Woman Rebels, The Great Garrick, Reunion in Vienna
- Zoltán Fábri (15 October 1917 – 23 August 1994) was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. His films The Boys of Paul Street (1969) and Hungarians (1978) were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His 1965 film Twenty Hours shared the Grand Prix with War and Peace at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival. His 1969 film The Toth Family was entered into the 7th Moscow International Film Festival. His 1975 film 141 Minutes from the Unfinished Sentence was entered into the 9th Moscow International Film Festival, where he won a Special Prize for Directing.Fábri wanted to become an artist from an early age on. He studied painting and graduated at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts. He began working in the Hungarian film industry in 1950 as a production designer. He directed his first film Vihar (Storm) in 1951. He became an internationally acclaimed director with his third feature Körhinta (Merry Go-Round) in 1956. He continued directing and writing until the early 1980s. After his retirement from the film industry Fábri taught on the Hungarian University of Theatrical and Film Arts. In his last years he wrote screenplays; they were never made. Fábri was also the president of the Hungarian Film Artist Union from 1959 to 1981. Fábri's style of filmmaking can be described mainly as "classical", using academic techniques of art filmmaking. His greatest influences were the Italian Neorealism and French Poetic Realism. He experimented with narrative and flashback techniques for a while in the 1960s (in his films Nappali sötétség and Húsz óra) and his 1976 film Az ötödik pecsét contains some highly surrealist scenes, but overall he never used the mannerisms of modernist film in his works. For this reason the Kádár regime favored Fábri over more controversial and experimental directors like Miklós Jancsó. The film won the Golden Prize at the 10th Moscow International Film Festival and was entered into the 27th Berlin International Film Festival.At the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979, he was awarded with the Honorable Prize for the contribution to cinema.He was known as a perfectionist who wrote, drawn and choreographed every scene to the most precise detail months before production began and never improvised anything. His reputation as a rigid, tyrannical director was somewhat contradicted by his friendly and kind behaviour towards the British and American child actors on the set of The Boys of Paul Street. Fábri made nearly all of his films based on literary material (novels or short stories) and wrote the screenplays himself. His constant theme was the question of humanity. Many of his films are set in or around World War II. Two of his frequent collaborators were actress Mari Törőcsik and cinematographer György Illés. In 1969 he played the role of prosecuted statesman Zoltán Dániel in his friend Péter Bacsó's cult satire, A tanú (The Witness) as his sole acting job. Fábri died in a heart attack at the age of 76 in 1994. His legal successor is Peter Fabri (b. 1985).
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Two Half Times in Hell, Merry-Go-Round, The Fifth Seal, Sweet Anna, Hungarians
- Zoltán Kodály (; Hungarian: Kodály Zoltán, pronounced [ˈkodaːj ˈzoltaːn]; 16 December 1882 – 6 March 1967) was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is well known internationally as the creator of the Kodály Method.
- Birthplace: Kecskemét, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Folk music of Hungary
- Marcel Lajos Breuer, was a Hungarian-born modernist, architect and furniture designer. One of the masters of Modernism, Breuer extended the sculptural vocabulary he had developed in the carpentry shop at the Bauhaus into a personal architecture that made him one of the world’s most popular architects at the peak of 20th-Century design.
- Birthplace: Pécs, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Germany
- Works: Buildings and projects, 1921-1961, Marcel Breuer: new buildings and projects
- Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrápolt (; Hungarian: nagyrápolti Szent-Györgyi Albert [ˈnɒɟraːpolti ˈsɛɲɟørɟi ˈɒlbɛrt]; September 16, 1893 – October 22, 1986) was a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with first isolating vitamin C and discovering the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. He was also active in the Hungarian Resistance during World War II and entered Hungarian politics after the war.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Austria-Hungary
- Works: Introduction to a submolecular biology, The crazy ape, On oxidation, fermentation, vitamins
- Lajos Zilahy (27 March 1891 − 1 December 1974) was a Hungarian novelist and playwright. Born in Nagyszalonta, Austria-Hungary (now Salonta in Romania), he studied law at the University of Budapest before serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, in which he was wounded on the Eastern Front – an experience which later informed his bestselling novel Two Prisoners (Két fogoly). He was also active in film. His 1928 novel Something Is Drifting on the Water (Valamit visz a víz) was filmed twice. His play The General was filmed as The Virtuous Sin in 1930 and The Rebel in 1931. Edited Híd (The Bridge) 1940–1944, an art periodical. Opposed both fascism and communism. In 1939 he established a film studio named Pegazus, which operated until the end of 1943. Pegazus produced motion pictures and Zilahy directed some of them. In 1944, his play Fatornyok (Wooden Towers) was banned. Gave all assets to government treasury in early 1940s for use in educating youth in world peace, which led to the establishment of Kitűnőek Iskolája. He wrote the 1943 screenplay himself and co-directed it with Gusztáv Oláh in Hungary under the international English title Something Is in the Water. The Czechoslovak screenplay was written by Imre Gyöngyössy, Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, and directed by the latter two with a Serbian, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech and American cast on location at the Danube in Slovakia under the title Desire Called Anada in Czech (Touha zvaná Anada, 1969) and Slovak (Túžba zvaná Anada), with Adrift as its English title. Lajos Zilahy became the Secretary General of Hungarian PEN but his liberal views placed him at odds, first with the right-wing Horthy regime and later with the post-war Communist government. Zilahy left Hungary in 1947, spending the rest of his life in exile in the USA, where he completed A Dukay család, a trilogy of novels (Century in Scarlet, The Dukays, The Angry Angel) chronicling the history of a fictitious Hungarian aristocratic family from the Napoleonic era to the middle of the twentieth century. He died in Novi Sad, Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia. Several of his novels have been translated into Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Rumanian, Serbian, Slovak,Slovenian, Spanish (mainly), Swedish, and Turkish, and some of his plays into German, Italian, and Spanish. An edition of his short stories is available in Spanish and some of his short stories have been translated into Bulgarian, Croatian, English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish, and some of his poems into German.
- Birthplace: Salonta, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary, Romania
- Works: The deserter, Valamit visz a víz, The angry angel, L'ange de la colère, A fegyverek visszanéznek
- Kálmán Mikszáth de Kiscsoltó (16 January 1847 – 28 May 1910) was a widely reputed Hungarian novelist, journalist, and politician. His work remains in print in Hungarian and still appears sporadically in other languages.
- Birthplace: Slovakia
- Nationality: Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: A fekete város, St. Peter's Umbrella, The Gentry, The Young Noszty’s Affair with Mary Tóth, The Siege of Beszterce
- Ágota Kristóf (Hungarian: Kristóf Ágota; October 30, 1935 – July 27, 2011) was a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristof received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook (1986). She won the 2001 Gottfried Keller Award in Switzerland and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2008.
- Birthplace: Csikvánd, Hungary
- Nationality: Switzerland, Hungary
- Works: L' heure grise et autres pièces, Der Beweis, The third lie, Das große Heft, La preuve
- Melchior Lengyel (12 January 1880 – 23 October 1974) was a Hungarian writer, dramatist, and film screenwriter of Jewish heritage.
- Birthplace: Balmazújváros, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary
- Works: To Be or Not to Be, Angyal, Hotel Imperial, Die zarin
George Jonas
Age: 89George Jonas, CM (June 15, 1935 – January 10, 2016) was a Hungarian-born Canadian writer, poet, and journalist. A self-described classical liberal, he authored 16 books, including the international bestseller Vengeance (1984), the story of an Israeli operation to kill the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre. The book has been adapted for film twice, first as Sword of Gideon (1986), and more recently as Munich (2005).- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Canada, Hungary
- Works: Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, By Persons Unknown, The East Wind Blows West, Crocodiles in the bathtub and other perils, The happy hungry man
- Anna Sandor is an award-winning screenwriter. Born in Hungary, she spent her childhood in Canada. Sandor began her career as an actress, becoming a writer in her mid-twenties. She has written everything from sitcoms to Hallmark Hall of Fame. Her films have garnered numerous major awards, including multiple Emmy nominations, three Humanitas Prizes, the Writers Guild of America Award and the Gemini Award. She has also won the Margaret Collier Award for lifetime achievement in the Canadian industry. She is a graduate of Harbord Collegiate and the University of Windsor. Sandor lives in San Diego, California.
- Birthplace: Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Tiger Cruise, A Kiss at Midnight, Molly: An American Girl on the Home Front, Samantha: An American Girl Holiday, My Louisiana Sky
- Kornél Mundruczó is a director, writer, and actor who is known for directing "The Crowded Room," "Pieces of a Woman," and "White God."
- Birthplace: Gödöllő, Hungary
- Nationality: People's Republic of Hungary, Hungary
- Works: Lost and Found - Six Glances of a Generation, Tender Son - The Frankenstein Project, Delta, Johanna, Little Apocrypha No. 2
- Ferenc Cakó (born 1950) is a Hungarian artist whose specialty is performing sand animation. He graduated from the College for Creative Arts in 1973 and did amateur animation at that point. His first success was in 1982 and in 1989 he was named artist of the Hungarian People's Republic. After that he did workshops in Finland, France, Spain, Belgium, and Portugal. Amongst his more recent performances, Ferenc Cakó performed in IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India at Techfest 2004. His show in the Open Air Theatre was a huge hit with thousands of students, professors and visitors attending it. Cakó's films have won prizes including the award for best short film at the Berlin International Film Festival, the jury prize for short film at the Cannes Film Festival, and numerous awards at the Kecskemét Animation Film Festival.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: People's Republic of Hungary, Hungary
- Works: Ad Rem, Ashes, Wailing, Stones, Vision
- Ferenc Herczeg (born Franz Herzog, 22 September 1863 in Versec, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire – 24 February 1954 in Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian playwright and author who promoted conservative nationalist opinion in his country. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.
- Birthplace: Vršac, Serbia
- Nationality: Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: The Colonel, Seven sisters
- László Moholy-Nagy (; Hungarian: [ˈlaːsloː ˈmohojnɒɟ]; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. A New York Times article called him "relentlessly experimental" because of his pioneering work in painting, drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film, theater, and writing.He also worked collaboratively with other artists, including his first wife Lucia Moholy, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Herbert Bayer. His largest accomplishment may be the School of Design in Chicago, which survives today as part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, which art historian Elizabeth Siegel called “his overarching work of art”. He also wrote books and articles advocating a utopian type of high modernism.
- Birthplace: Bácsborsód, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Vision in motion, the photographs of László Moholy-Nagy
- Gabriel Pascal (born Gábor Lehel) (4 June 1894 – 6 July 1954) was a Hungarian-born film producer and director whose best-known films were made in the United Kingdom. A follower of Meher Baba, Pascal was the first film producer to successfully bring the plays of George Bernard Shaw to the screen. His most successful production was Pygmalion, for which Pascal received an Academy Award nomination as its producer. Later adaptations of Shaw plays included Major Barbara (1941) and Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).
- Birthplace: Arad, Vest, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary, United Kingdom, Germany
- Works: Major Barbara
- John George Kemeny (born Kemény János György; May 31, 1926 – December 26, 1992) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. Kurtz. Kemeny served as the 13th President of Dartmouth College from 1970 to 1981 and pioneered the use of computers in college education. Kemeny chaired the presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Calculus version 3.0, Structured BASIC programming, Finite mathematical structures, Computing for a course in finite mathematics, Denumerable Markov chains
- See my home page for more details, do not want to repeat it here... You can also consult my blog.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: France, Hungary
- Works: The use of projective geometry in computer graphics, PREMO: a framework for multimedia middleware, Semantic Web: Introduction and applications
- Cinematographer noted for his work in the urban action genre. Laszlo moved with his family to Hungary as a child and immigrated to the USA in 1947. He began his American career in TV ("The Phil Silvers Show," "Naked City").
- Birthplace: Papa, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: A Fight of No Consequence, Footnote to history, The Rat Catcher, The Seven Graces of God, Every frame a Rembrandt
- Frank Partos (2 July 1901, Budapest - 23 December 1956, Los Angeles) an American screenwriter, of Hungarian Jewish origin, and an early executive committee member of the Screen Actors Guild, which he helped found.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: The Uninvited, The Snake Pit, The House on Telegraph Hill, Stranger on the Third Floor, Honolulu
- Imre Kertész (Hungarian: [ˈimrɛ ˈkɛrteːs]; 9 November 1929 – 31 March 2016) was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature. His works deal with themes of Nazi Holocaust (he was a survivor of a German concentration camp), dictatorship and personal freedom. He died on 31 March 2016, aged 86, at his home in Budapest after suffering from Parkinson's disease for several years.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Fateless, Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidacion / Liquidation, Eine Geschichte. Zwei Geschichten
- Péter Forgács (born 1950) is a media artist and independent filmmaker based in Budapest, Hungary. He is best known for his "Private Hungary" series of award winning films based on home movies from the 1930s and 1960s, which document ordinary lives that were soon to be ruptured by an extraordinary historical trauma that occurs off screen.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: People's Republic of Hungary, Hungary
- Works: Free Fall, Miss Universe 1929, Hungary 2011
- John Adalbert Lukacs (; Hungarian: Lukács János Albert; 31 January 1924 – 6 May 2019) was a Hungarian-born American historian who wrote more than thirty books, including Five Days in London, May 1940 and A New Republic. He was a professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia from 1947 to 1994 and chaired that department from 1947 to 1974. He served as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Princeton University, La Salle University, Regent College in British Columbia and the University of Budapest and Hanover College. Lukacs was Roman Catholic. Lukacs described himself as a reactionary.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Democracy and Populism, June 1941, Churchill, Budapest 1900, The Duel
- Sándor Márai [ˈʃaːndor ˈmaːrɒi] (originally Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmid de Mára, archaically English: Alexander Márai; 11 April 1900 – 21 February 1989) was a Hungarian writer and journalist.
- Birthplace: Košice, Slovakia
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Embers, Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels, Memoir of Hungary, 1944-48
- Franz Lehár ( LAY-har; Hungarian: Lehár Ferenc [ˈlɛhaːr ˈfɛrɛnt͡s]; 30 April 1870 – 24 October 1948) was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas, of which the most successful and best known is The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe).
- Birthplace: Hungary, Komárom
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary
- Works: Thematischer index, The merry widow
- Ladislas Fodor is a screenwriter.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: North to Alaska, Tom Thumb, Old Shatterhand, Kampf um Rom I, The Devil Came from Akasava
- Count Albert Wass de Szentegyed et Czege (Hungarian gróf szentegyedi és czegei Wass Albert; Válaszút, Kingdom of Hungary (now Răscruci, Cluj County, Romania), January 8. 1908 – Astor Park, Florida, February 17, 1998) was a Hungarian nobleman, forest engineer, novelist, poet and member of the Wass de Czege family. In 1944 he fled from Romania to Hungary, and then joined the fleeing Wehrmacht forces and ended up in Germany, then emigrated to the U.S. After World War II, he was condemned as a war criminal by the Romanian People's Tribunals, however, United States authorities refused to extradite Wass to Romania claiming the lack of solid evidence.The works of Albert Wass first gained recognition within Hungarian literature from Transylvania in the 1940s. In 1944 he moved to Germany and later in 1952 to the United States, and lived there till his death. During the communist regime his books were banned both in Hungary and in Romania. Part of his works were published in Hungary after the change of political system in 1989, however, before this time, his works were unknown to Hungarian public. He is popular among the Hungarian minority in Romania and has a growing popularity in Hungary. In 2005 in a public assessment (Nagy Könyv), he was found to be one of the most popular Hungarian authors: his book "A funtineli boszorkány" (The Witch of Funtinel) was named the 12th most popular book; two more books were named in the top 50 ranking, including the family saga "Kard és kasza" (Sword and Scythe).
- Birthplace: Bonțida, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: The red star wanes, A láthatatlan lobogó, A költő és a macska, Justice for Transylvania!, Kard és kasza
- Péter Gothár (born 28 August 1947) is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. He has directed 23 films since 1974. His film The Outpost was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.
- Birthplace: Hungary, Pécs
- Nationality: Hungarian Republic, Hungary
- Works: The Outpost, Letgohand Vaska (A Tale from the Labour Camp), A Priceless Day, Time Stands Still, Passport
Andor von Barsy
Dec. at 65 (1899-1964)Andor von Barsy was a film director, producer and editor, screenwriter, cinematographer and production designer.- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Hoogstraat, Rotterdam, Pfaff Sewing Machine, The Municipal Gas Plant Rotterdam, Between Arrival and Departure
- János Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye (; Hungarian: Selye János; January 26, 1907 – October 16, 1982), was a pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist of Hungarian origin. He conducted important scientific work on the hypothetical non-specific response of an organism to stressors. Although he did not recognize all of the many aspects of glucocorticoids, Selye was aware of their role in the stress response. Charlotte Gerson considers him the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress.
- Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
- Nationality: Canada, Austria, Hungary
- Works: The stress of life, The physiology and pathology of exposure to stress, Textbook of endocrinology, Hormones and resistance, The chemical prevention of cardiac necroses
- Pablo F. Fenjves (born 1953) is an American screenwriter and ghostwriter based in Los Angeles, California. His screenwriting credits include the 1995 film The Affair, Man on a Ledge, released in January 2012, and a string of television movies. Fenjves ghostwrote the book If I Did It, an account of the O. J. Simpson murder case. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, on August 16, 1953, to Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust, Fenjves went to college in Illinois. His first journalism job was in Canada. He joined the National Enquirer in Florida in the late 1970s, where he befriended Judith Regan.Fenjves has ghostwritten more than a dozen books, including two number one New York Times Best-Sellers (Witness and Blood Brother). Fenjves also ghostwrote the autobiographies and memoirs of Bernie Mac, Janice Dickinson, and music producer David Foster. His current film projects include an original action script, Undertow, which is being produced by Michael De Luca; and an original comedy, Mother, to which Halle Berry is attached.
- Birthplace: Caracas, Venezuela
- Nationality: Venezuela
- Works: Man on a Ledge, If I Did It
- Louis de Wohl (earlier Ludwig von Wohl, born Lajos Theodor Gaspar Adolf Wohl) was a German-born Catholic author, and had served as an astrologer notable for his work with MI5 during World War II. Sixteen of his popular pre-war novels were the basis of movies. His later novels are literary hagiographies of notable Roman Catholic saints and of different periods of the Bible.
- Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
- Nationality: Hungary, United Kingdom, Germany
- Works: Crime Over London, Crime Over London, The joyful beggar, David de Jerusalem, El Mensajero del Rey
- Rudolf Lothar [rú:dolf ló:tar] (born Rudolf Lothar Spitzer; February 25, 1865 in Budapest – October 2, 1943 in Budapest) was a Hungarian-born Austrian writer, playwright, critic and essayist.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austrian Empire, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: The Red Cat
- Ervin László (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈɛrvin ˈlaːsloː]; born 12 June 1932) is a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist, originally a classical pianist. He is an advocate of the theory of quantum consciousness.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Co-Operation for Development in Asia, The inner limits of mankind, Disarmament: The Human Factor, Introduction to Systems Philosophy - Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought, The Communist Ideology in Hungary
- Daniel Carleton Gajdusek ( GHY-də-shek; September 9, 1923 – December 12, 2008) was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on an infectious agent which would later be identified as kuru, the first known human prion disease.In 1996, Gajdusek was charged with child molestation and, after being convicted, spent 12 months in prison before entering a self-imposed exile in Europe, where he died a decade later. His papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. and at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
- Birthplace: Yonkers, New York
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Melanesian journal, West New Guinea journal, May 6, 1960 to July 10, 1960 / D. Carleton Gajdusek
- Joseph Joachim (Hungarian: Joachim József, 28 June 1831 – 15 August 1907) was a Hungarian violinist, conductor, composer and teacher. A close collaborator of Johannes Brahms, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant violinists of the 19th century.
- Birthplace: Kittsee, Austria
- Nationality: Austria, Hungary
- Works: Letters from and to Joseph Joachim
- Frigyes Karinthy (Hungarian: [ˈfriɟɛʃ ˈkɒrinti]; 25 June 1887 – 29 August 1938) was a Hungarian author, playwright, poet, journalist, and translator. He was the first proponent of the six degrees of separation concept, in his 1929 short story, Chains (Láncszemek). Karinthy remains one of the most popular Hungarian writers. He was the father of poet Gábor Karinthy and writer Ferenc Karinthy. Among the English translations of Karinthy's works are two science fiction novellas that continue the adventures of Swift's character Gulliver. Voyage to Faremido is an early examination of artificial intelligence, with a pacifist theme, while Capillaria is a polished and darkly humorous satire on the 'battle of the sexes'.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: The Stork Caliph, A Penny's History, Nyomozom a detektívet, Mozibolond, Capillária
- Géza Bereményi is a Hungarian writer, screewriter and film director. He was awarded Best European Director for his film Eldorado at the 2nd European Film Awards.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungarian Republic, Hungary
- Works: The Door, A Nice Neighbor, The Midas Touch, Children of Glory, The Two of Them
- Géza Hofi (born Géza Hoffmann, 2 July 1936 in Budapest; died 10 April 2002 in Budapest) was a Hungarian actor and comedian. He is probably the most popular Hungarian parodist and had strong influence on Hungarian cabaret.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Még mindig aktuális..., Tiszta örültek háza, Nevezz csak Cucinak!, Koncert - A szomjas magyar alkoholisták javára, Temetném a munkát...
- Károly Kós was a Hungarian architect, writer, illustrator, ethnologist and politician of Austria-Hungary and Romania.
- Birthplace: Romania
- Nationality: Hungary, Romania
- Works: Transylvania
- George Pólya (; Hungarian: Pólya György [ˈpoːjɒ ˈɟørɟ]) (December 13, 1887 – September 7, 1985) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education. He has been described as one of The Martians.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Probability, Complex variables, How to Solve It, The random walks of George Pólya, Problems and Theorems in Analysis. Volume II
- Kati Marton (born April 3, 1949) is a Hungarian-American author and journalist. Her career has included reporting for ABC News as a foreign correspondent and National Public Radio, where she started as a production assistant in 1971, as well as print journalism and writing a number of books. She is a former chairwoman of the International Women's Health Coalition, and a director (former chairwoman) of the Committee to Protect Journalists and other bodies including the International Rescue Committee, Human Rights Watch, and the New America Foundation.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: People's Republic of Hungary, United States of America, Hungary
- Works: The Great Escape, Hidden power, The Polk conspiracy, A death in Jerusalem, Paris: A Love Story
- Endre Hules is an actor, voice actor, screenwriter, film director and film producer.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Prima Primavera, The Maiden Danced to Death
- Katalin Ladik (born Novi Sad, October 25, 1942) is a Hungarian poet, performance artist and actress. She was born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (now called Serbia) and in the last 20 years she has lived and worked alternately in Novi Sad, Serbia, in Budapest, Hungary and on the island of Hvar, Croatia. Parallel to her written poems she also creates sound poems and visual poems, performance art, writes and performs experimental music and audio plays. She is also a performer and an experimental artist (happenings, mail art, experimental theatrical plays). She explores language through visual and vocal expressions, as well as movement and gestures. Her work includes collages, photography, records, performances and happenings in both urban and natural environments.
- Birthplace: Serbia, Novi Sad
- Nationality: Serbia, Hungary
- Works: Stories of the seven-headed sewing machine
- Ladislas Farago was a writer who was known for writing "Tora! Tora! Tora!," "Patton," and "The Last Days of Patton."
- Birthplace: Csurgo, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary
- Works: Tora! Tora! Tora!, Royal Web, Patton, ordeal and triumph, German psychological warfare
- Dennis Gabor ( GAH-bor, gə-BOR; Hungarian: Gábor Dénes [ˈɡaːbor ˈdeːnɛʃ]; 5 June 1900 – 9 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.Gábor Dénes College in Budapest, Hungary, is named after him in honour of his works.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, United Kingdom
- Works: The Mature Society. A View of the Future, Inventing the Future, Beyond the Age of Waste: A Report to the Club of Rome, Innovations: Scientific, Technological
- João Bethencourt was a screenwriter and writer.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Brazil, Hungary
- Works: My Home Is Copacabana
- Móric Jókay de Ásva ([ˈmoːr ˈjoːkɒi], known as Mór Jókai; 18 February 1825 – 5 May 1904), outside Hungary also known as Maurus Jokai or Mauritius Jókai, was a Hungarian novelist, dramatist and revolutionary. He was active participant and a leading personality in the outbreak of Hungarian Liberal Revolution of 1848 in Pest. Jókai's romantic novels became very popular among the elite of Victorian era England; he was often compared to Dickens in the 19th century British press. One of his most famous fans and admirers was Queen Victoria herself.
- Birthplace: Komárom, Hungary
- Nationality: Austria-Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: The Man with the Golden Touch, The Baron’s Sons, A Hungarian Nabob, The Poor Plutocrats, Pretty Michal
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Árnyéklovasság
Karl Kerényi
Dec. at 76 (1897-1973)Károly (Carl, Karl) Kerényi (Hungarian: Kerényi Károly, pronounced [ˈkɛreːɲi ˈkaːroj]; 19 January 1897 – 14 April 1973) was a Hungarian scholar in classical philology and one of the founders of modern studies of Greek mythology.- Birthplace: Timișoara, Romania
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: Die Religion der Griechen und Römer, Romandichtung und Mythologie, Dionysos: Urbild des unzerstorbaren Lebens, Eleusis: archetypal image of mother and daughter, Oedipus Variations
- Theodore von Kármán (Hungarian: (szőlőskislaki) Kármán Tódor [(sølløːʃkiʃlɒki) ˈkaːrmaːn ˈtoːdor]; 11 May 1881 – 6 May 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization. He is regarded as the outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the twentieth century.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: United States of America, Hungary, Germany
- Works: The wind and beyond, Mathematical methods in engineering
- Ferenc Rofusz (born 19 August 1946) is a Hungarian animator. He is known for the 1980 Academy Award-winning animated short The Fly.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary
- Works: The Fly
- György Szomjas (born 26 November 1940) is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. He has directed over 25 films since 1965. His 1983 film Tight Quarters was entered into the 34th Berlin International Film Festival. Szomjas is the father of the Hungarian Ostern, the Goulash Western: in 1970s was directed two osterns about the Hungarian rascallys the Wrong Doers and The Wind Blows Under Your Feat.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Nationality: Hungary, Kingdom of Hungary
- Works: Bald-Dog Rock, Mr. Universe, Wrong-Doers, The Wind Is Whistling Under Their Feet, The Wall Driller
