Minta Gymnasium ("Model") was a secondary school in Budapest, Hungary, founded by , Hungarian philosopher and educator who reformed the Hungarian school system. It is noted, together with Fasori Lutheran Gymnasium and the Piarist Gymnasium, for a number of talented students.

History

Minta Gymnasium was founded by in 1872 on the German model. It was a state-owned school for boys with a focus on training school teachers. "Minta" ("model") was not an official name, it was so called because "to gain qualification as a teacher, the student was expected to learn how to teach not only what to teach." Students of Minta practiced teaching, and teachers of the school worked with university students in parallel. The gymnasium got its own building in 1887. Mór Kármán was a director until 1896.

Theodore von Kármán Theodore von Kármán ( , May 11, 1881May 6, 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing ...

, mathematician, aerospace engineer, and one of the sons of Minta's founder Mór Karman, later wrote about his school years (1891-1899):

teaching everything by showing its connection with everyday living. In our beginning Latin class, for instance, I remember that we did not start with rules of grammar. Instead we were told to walk around the city and copy the inscriptions on statutes, churches, and museums. ... When we had collected the phrases and brought them to class. The teacher asked us which words we already knew. We usually could recognize a few words among the phrases. If we didn't, we looked them up. Then he asked us if we recognized the same word in different forms. Why were the forms different? Because they showed different relationships to other words in the inscription. We continued in this way until we understood each phrase and why it was placed on the monument. Mathematics, which I studied eagerly, was taught in terms of everyday statics. ... For instance we looked up the figures of production of wheat in Hungary for several years. We set up tables and then drew graphs, so we could observe the changes and locate the maximum and minimum of wheat production. In the diagrams we searched for correlations and we learned about "the rate of change", which brought us to the edge of the calculus. We thus learned in a practical way that there was a relationship between quantities that varied, and, as with Latin, we learned at the same time something of the changing social and economic forces of the country.

von Karman also wrote in his autobiography that "Instead of memorizing from books students had to look up figures, set up diagrams, search for correlations between changing quantities or from Latin vocabulary gathered from every day life to deduce some basic rules for inflection and conjugation of Latin nouns and verbs". Physicist

Edward Teller Edward Teller (; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian and American Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist and chemical engineer who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of ...

, also a graduate of Minta, had different memories (1917-1925):

school was not academically stimulating. Students were required to participate but there was little enthusiasm for learning. The teachers were unenthusiastic; most classrooms were in semi-revolt. There was no real interest or exchange of ideas.

Among the subjects were Hungarian and German language and literature, Latin and Greek, religion and ethics, philosophy, geography, natural history, representative geometry, mathematics, and physics, art and gym. Mathematician "viewed that school as the first one where a student did not simply learn subject matter, but learned to think." The gymnasium still exists, but is now called Trefort Ágoston Practicing Gimnázium of

Eötvös Loránd University Eötvös Loránd University (, ELTE, also known as ''University of Budapest'') is a Hungarian public research university based in Budapest. Founded in 1635, ELTE is one of the largest and most prestigious public higher education institutions in ...

, its address being 8 Trefort Street, District VIII.

Famous students

, mathematician, aerospace engineer, attended Minta in 1891-1899 *

Thomas Balogh Thomas Balogh, Baron Balogh (2 November 190520 January 1985), born Balog Tamás, was a British economist and member of the House of Lords. The elder son of a wealthy Budapest Jewish family (his father was head of public transport, his mother ...

and

Nicholas Kaldor Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor (12 May 1908 – 30 September 1986), born Káldor Miklós, was a Hungarian-born British economist. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare spending, welfare comparisons ...

, economists, graduated in the 1920s *

Alfréd Rényi Alfréd Rényi (20 March 1921 – 1 February 1970) was a Hungarian mathematician known for his work in probability theory, though he also made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory. Life Rényi was born in Budapest to A ...

, mathematician *

Peter Lax Peter David Lax (1 May 1926 – 16 May 2025) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. Lax made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics an ...

, mathematician *

Michael Polanyi Michael Polanyi ( ; ; 11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowle ...

, physical chemist, graduated in 1908 *

Karl Polanyi Karl Paul Polanyi (; ; 25 October 1886 – 23 April 1964)''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2003) vol 9. p. 554 was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best kno ...

, historian * , mathematician, attended Minta in 1913-1918 *

Nicholas Kurti Nicholas Kurti, () (14 May 1908 – 24 November 1998) was a Hungarian-born British physicist who lived in Oxford, UK, for most of his life. Career Born in Budapest, Kurti went to high school at the Minta Gymnasium, but due to anti-Jewish law ...

, low temperature physicist *

, theoretical physicist, attended gymnasium in 1917-1925 *

Leo Szilard Leo Szilard (; ; born Leó Spitz; February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-born physicist, biologist and inventor who made numerous important discoveries in nuclear physics and the biological sciences. He conceived the nuclear ...

, physicist *

Thomas Szasz Thomas Stephen Szasz ( ; ; 15 April 1920 – 8 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. A dis ...

, psychiatrist

References

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