CAA logo
 
 

General Information / Culture, Science, Sport

The Music of Hungary consists mainly of traditional Hungarian folk music and music by prominent composers such as Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Hungarian traditional music tends to have a strong dactylic rhythm, just as the language is invariably stressed on the first syllable of each word.

Hungarian cuisine is also a prominent feature of Hungarian culture, with traditional dishes such as goulash (gulyás or gulyásleves) a main feature of the Hungarian diet. Dishes are often flavoured with paprika. Stews are often to be found with typical elements such as pork or beef, for example as used in pörkölt.

Hungary is famous for its excellent mathematics education which has trained numerous outstanding scientists. Famous Hungarian mathematicians include Paul Erdős who is famous for publishing in over forty languages and whose Erdős numbers are still tracked, János (John) Bolyai designer of non-Euclidian geometry or "absolute geometry" in 1831, John von Neumann, one of the pioneers in digital computing, Eugene Wigner and many others. Erdős, von Neumann, and Wigner, like other Hungarian Jewish scientists, fled rising anti-Semitism in Europe, and made their most famous contributions in the United States.

Hungarians are very proud of their inventions. These include the noiseless match (János Irínyi), Rubik's cube, the krypton electric bulb (Imre Bródy, 1891–1944), and the aforementioned non-Euclidian geometry. A number of other important inventions, including holography, the ballpoint pen (invented by Bíró, who gave his name to the invention), the theory of the hydrogen bomb, and the BASIC programming language, were invented by Hungarians who fled the country prior to World War II. Till 2007 totally 14 famous Hungarian has won the Nobel Prize.

Hungarian literature has recently gained some renown outside the borders of Hungary (mostly through translations into German, French and English). Some modern Hungarian authors became increasingly popular in Germany and Italy especially Sándor Márai, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas and Imre Kertész. The latter is a contemporary Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002.

 

More