by Olivia Wild
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Miklós Farkas (1932 – 2007), Professor Emeritus, worked at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics for forty-five years. He spent nine years abroad on assignments as visiting professor in countries including Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, Canada, Australia and Columbia. He is the author of several papers and monographs, most of them published in English. He has received a number of prestigious scientific awards. He lived through the siege of Budapest in 1945 as a child, and the battles of 1956 as a young postgraduate student. During his final professorial assignment in Medellín, Columbia he wrote about his life in the form of a collection of historical essays, which he later turned into this book: ‘The Twentieth Century – Memoirs of a Hungarian Mathematician’.
The author paints a picture of the twentieth century based on his personal experiences. He writes about his father who suffered a serious injury in the Great War and was disabled for life; the German occupation of Hungary; the siege of Budapest; Hungarian history including the 1945-48 transition period, the Rákosi era, the 1956 uprising, the Kádár era, and the change of political system in 1990. This book is not only about Miklós Farkas’s personal experiences, but also about how those experiences affected his thinking and the opinions he gradually formed based on them. He explores how the Kingdom of Iraq was toppled, how the colonised African states gained independence, how the Biafran War erupted in Nigeria, and the struggles of various countries in Latin America.
He also writes about how he became a mathematician, the scientific life in Hungary in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and his time spent abroad as visiting professor.
Miklós Farkas’s views are original. It could be said that some of them are controversial and provocative, but they are definitely honest. The author’s witty, sometimes humorous, comments make his evocation of the history of the twentieth century highly enjoyable – despite this period being so abundant with tragedies and sorrow.
Olivia Wild 