The Martians of Budapest

“There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on Earth: Humans and Hungarians” — Isaac Asimov

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John von Neumann, Paul Erdős, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, Leó Szilárd, Theodore von Kármán, Paul Halmos, George Polya and John G. Kemeny

The “Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a group of men with superhuman intellects, arriving from an obscure country speaking an incomprehensible foreign language and English with strong, characteristic accents (later popularized by Bela Lugosi in Dracula). Scientists typically thought to belong to the group include refugees from the University of Göttingen, early associates of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and members of The Manhattan Project, including:

• John von Neumann (1903–1957), Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos. The po…