Fazekas Mihály Gimnázium (in English:

Mihály Fazekas Mihály Fazekas (6 January 1766 – 23 February 1828) was a Hungarian writer from Debrecen. He was an army private for seven years before being commissioned as a Hussar officer. As a hobby, Fazekas studied the natural sciences (botany) and w ...

High School; full official name: ''Budapesti Fazekas Mihály Gyakorló Általános Iskola és Gimnázium''; also known among alumni as simply ''Fazekas'' (potter) or even ''Fazék'' (pot)) is a high school in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

. Over the past 40 years it has built up a reputation for excellence, especially in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

and in the

exact science The exact sciences, sometimes called the exact mathematical sciences, are those sciences "which admit of absolute precision in their results"; especially the mathematical sciences. Examples of the exact sciences are mathematics, optics, astron ...

s .

History

Early years

The school's history reaches back to 1911 when the

mayor of Budapest The Mayor of Budapest ( hu, Budapest főpolgármestere) is the head of the General Assembly in Budapest, Hungary, elected directly for 5-year term since 2014 (previously municipal elections were held quadrennially). Until 1994 the mayor was elect ...

opened an elementary school at the site to meet the increasing demand for education in the expanding city. A year later, the building became temporary home to the Pedagogical Seminary, whose purpose was to provide guidance and later supervision for all teachers and schools in the city. The elementary school thus became a ''training school'' where teachers could become acquainted with the latest pedagogical techniques. The seminars given at the school became enormously popular between the two

World War A world war is an international conflict which involves all or most of the world's major powers. Conventionally, the term is reserved for two major international conflicts that occurred during the first half of the 20th century, World WarI (1914 ...

Zsigmond Móricz Zsigmond Móricz (; 29 June 1879, Tiszacsécse – 4 September 1942) was a major Hungarian novelist and Social Realist. Biography Zsigmond Móricz was born in Tiszacsécse in 1879 to Bálint Móricz and Erzsébet Pallagi. On his mother's ...

often praised them in

Nyugat ''Nyugat'' ( Hungarian for ''West''; pronounced similar to ''New-Got''), was an important Hungarian literary journal in the first half of the 20th century. Writers and poets from that era are referred to as "1st/2nd/3rd generation of the NYUGAT" ...

. The beginnings of the high school are to be found in the St. Benedictus High School run by Benedictine monks from 1923 at a site very close to the present location. After the Communist takeover the school was nationalised and continued under the present name. The proximity of the Pedagogical Seminary allowed for close and deepening cooperation. In 1960 the high school was transformed into a training high school to extend the model (already successful for elementary schools) to the entire 12 years of education. The high school moved to the present building and the full, official name became Fazekas Mihály Fővárosi Gyakorló Általános Iskola és Gimnázium. The building was severely damaged both in

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

and again in the 1956 revolution. Since 1957 the Seminary has enjoyed its most successful period ever.

Rise of an elite school

Fazekas's prestigious reputation is linked to special mathematics classes which were started in 1962, when Imre Rábai gathered some promising talent who went on to achieve world fame for the school in the subject. Ever since, numerous Fazekas alumni have excelled on the world stage, particularly in

and the

natural sciences Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...

. The eight-strong Hungarian team participating in the 1966

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except i ...

consisted solely of Fazekas students and three of them (

László Lovász László Lovász (; born March 9, 1948) is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He ...

, and Lajos Pósa) returned with gold medals. This and other results in both national and international competitions have since ranked the school top among its peers in Hungary to this day. The

International Science Olympiad The International Science Olympiads are a group of worldwide annual competitions in various areas of the formal sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. The competitions are designed for the 4-6 best high school students from each participa ...

teams for Hungary regularly include several Fazekas students.

Notable alumni

* Babai, László - mathematician,

Gödel prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inter ...

winner * Baranyai, Zsolt - mathemathican,

Baranyai's theorem In combinatorial mathematics, Baranyai's theorem (proved by and named after Zsolt Baranyai) deals with the decompositions of complete hypergraphs. Statement of the theorem The statement of the result is that if 2\le r are integers and ...

, musician, Bakfark Consort * Elekes, György, mathematician * Csörnyei, Marianna - mathematician, won a 2002

Whitehead Prize The Whitehead Prize is awarded yearly by the London Mathematical Society to multiple mathematicians working in the United Kingdom who are at an early stage of their career. The prize is named in memory of homotopy theory pioneer J. H. C. Whiteh ...

and a

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

Wolfson Research Merit Award The Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award was an award made by the Royal Society from 2000 to 2020. It was administered by the Royal Society and jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the UK Office of Science and Technology, to provide ...

that same year * Draskovics, Tibor - jurist, politician, Minister of Justice and Law Enforcement (approx.: Attorney General). * Hiller, István - politician. Former Socialist party leader, former minister of education * Kovács, Ákos - singer, composer * Laczkovich, Miklós - mathematician * Lovász, László - mathematician, winner of the

Wolf Prize in Mathematics The Wolf Prize in Mathematics is awarded almost annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Medicine, Physics and Arts. ...

and of 3 gold medals at the IMOs * Magyar, Bálint - politician, former Minister of Education * Pálfy, Péter Pál - mathematician, former director of the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the

Hungarian Academy of Sciences The Hungarian Academy of Sciences ( hu, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, MTA) is the most important and prestigious learned society of Hungary. Its seat is at the bank of the Danube in Budapest, between Széchenyi rakpart and Akadémia utca. Its ma ...

* Pósa, Lajos - mathematician, IMO winner * Pintz, János - mathematician * Ruzsa, Imre Z. - mathematician * Thürmer, Gyula - Communist party leader

References

External links

Official site of Fazekas Mihály Gimnázium, Budapest
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fazekas Mihaly Gimnazium Gymnasiums in Hungary Education in Budapest