What is it with the Hungarians?

[Bored Of Education]

Bath is twinned with Kaposvar in Hungary. The twinning society is having an evening of lectures by mathematicians there.

Fairly random idea I thought until I found out that there is a tradition of Hungarian mathematicians. Why is that?

[Guest]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Something in the Goulash?

[Bored Of Education]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Something in the Gulags?

[Bruno]

What is it with the Hungarians?

It's because they're an oriental people.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

What is it with the Hungarians?

it's partially because their language is very complicated, encouraging the early development of the area of the brain common to the two fields. Also there is a very strong culture of mathematical education coming out of this.

[Alderman Barnes]

What is it with the Hungarians?

They're very good at chess, as well, aren't they?

[ursus arctos]

What is it with the Hungarians?

aiatl beat me to it.

It is also a field in which they can communicate with others without having a total command of another language (very few non-Hungarians bother to learn Hungarian). Their relative strength in chess (especially at youth level) is further evidence of the interplay among all of these factors.

The Hapsburg academic tradition doesn't hurt, either.

[Bruno]

What is it with the Hungarians?

They do well with pianists and conductors, too, not entirely unrelated.

[ad hoc]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Hmmm. I'm not convinced by all of this. Does someone have a source on how the Hungarian language being "complicated" (and what does that mean?) influences their abilities in maths, chess, music etc? I'm more inclined to assume it's a cultural/educational thing.

But as the father of a 3 year old who speaks English and Hungarian fluently, I'd be interested if someone could show me the research that goes against my gut reactions

[Bruno]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Have you started her with the flashcards?

[Brandenburger Toro]

What is it with the Hungarians?

yeah, I echo ad hoc's doubts on the "complicatedness" thing. How is this measured, for a start?

I can easily imagine how it might be especially difficult to learn as an adult, or as a second language. But the early developmental process, the stage of language acquisition, doesn't seem any different from the acquisition of any other languages, which don't as a rule call on general intelligence. I can't see how or why it would cause the brain to develop abnormally.

[Pinback]

What is it with the Hungarians?

There's loads of evidence that different stimuli influence neural development at the physical level, so I don't think it's unlikely that learning a given language in early life will affect the brain's development in a particular way.

Perfect pitch is alleged to be reasonably common among speakers of Mandarin Chinese, and there's some evidence that those people use a different area of the brain to solve mathematical problems than those who speak western languages.

I don't think it's unreasonable to extrapolate these effects to other languages.

[Ek weet nie]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Pitch in Chinese is important in changing the meaning of the word though. There are four types of pitch as well as neutral pitch. For a given syllable all 5 different ways of saying what is two western letters in pinyin will alter the meaning.

Could the fact that their numbering system is different be a factor in the different area of their brain used?

[Bruno]

What is it with the Hungarians?

We need a culture that doesn't place a lot of emphasis on producing good mathematicians, that nonetheless produces a disproportionate number of good mathematicians.

[Pinback]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Possibly, but for the purposes of the research the maths tests were in western notation.

Edit: To Nil.

[Ek weet nie]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Their textbooks and exams use western notation too. I'm just going by my girlfriend. Going between english and chinese is generally pretty easy for her but she gets very muddled with large numbers and mathematical operations. She might be just crap at maths though.

[Femme Folle]

What is it with the Hungarians?

But, but, but...these are all just more sweeping generalisations. Is there any empirical evidence to suggest that Hungarians are better at maths on a per capita basis than, say, Germans?

[Pinback]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Amusingly this doesn't do much to advance the argument.

[Ek weet nie]

What is it with the Hungarians?

There's a big difference between general standards and those of the elite though. The US is way down there but I imagine at the elite level they are well represented.

[linus]

What is it with the Hungarians?

I really doubt that the magyar language is behind the alleged math prowess of hungarian people. It's probably not any harder to master for natives than french, russian or german. Perhaps the fact that it's so different a language makes people assume that its speakers would acquire special attributes.

Generally speaking there is a strong math tradition across many countries in continental Europe (France, Russia, Germany.) In Germany that aspect was erroded by the American cultural influence, which loosened their academic standards a bit, while perhaps in Hungary it was strengthened by the Soviet conquest (along with their chess tradition). As well Hungary has generally been a stable and strong culture with more continuity less economic and political turmoil in its history than say Poland or Yugoslavia, their academic and scientific communities have probably benefitted from that over the centuries.

[Brandenburger Toro]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Aye. There's a very strong tradition in formal logic in Poland, for instance - nobody, as far as I know, has claimed that it is anything but just that; a tradition. More value/respect accorded to it socially, more understanding of what's going on among the general public, more scope for identifying, training, and nourishing talented youngsters. To ascribe it to neural side-effects of a complex grammar is to massively overdetermine the phenomenon. You might as well speculate that learning such a complex language gave one a particular affinity for the tactical problems of 1950s football, or for the singing of Hungarian drinking songs.

[Pinback]

What is it with the Hungarians?

I'm sure you're right Toro. As ever, I managed to get distracted from the specifics into a little micro-debate of my own about the concept in general.

[Brandenburger Toro]

What is it with the Hungarians?

heh. I know that feeling.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

What is it with the Hungarians?

Hmmm. I'm not convinced by all of this. Does someone have a source on how the Hungarian language being "complicated" (and what does that mean?) influences their abilities in maths, chess, music etc? I'm more inclined to assume it's a cultural/educational thing.

as far as I can remember, (It is a long time since I read this) the hungarian language has more than 20 cases, (vastly more than any other indo-european language, english has three) a lot of vowel phonemes, and a complicated system for internally arranging them, and there is something involving how they handle nouns that is rather pernickety as well.

in short the theory is that speaking a language with as many formal rules, and complications helps to stimulate peoples capacity to applying fairly complex rules while manipulating concepts.

this is then further strengthened by a different method of teaching maths which I think concentrates on giving people clues as to how to reach the solution by themselves. I think this is a more recent development though.

[Brandenburger Toro]

What is it with the Hungarians?

But that presumes that language learning is achieved by general intelligence/learning processes. That may be true of secondary language-learning, but the best available linguistic theories suggest the acquisition* of one's first language does not depend on those processes. So unless there is specific evidence of a causal relationship between learning a complex** language and advanced mathematical abilities, there's no reason to think the two are related. The hypothesis is both unlikely and unnecessary, since it doesn't explain the observed data, and doesn't have to.

*Chomsky, for instance, thinks "learning" isn't even an appropriate term...
**Even on the terms you define, "complex" seems a fairly arbitrary judgement. Grammatical distinctions - cases, for instance - are not gratuitous, and the information they communicate has to be got across some other way - typically by having a greater array of prepositions. That may look a less complex solution to us, but only because it's the one we're used to. There's no reason to think it's significantly harder in purely computational terms.