ABSTRACT
Rudolf Ortvay attended primary school in Miskolc, then the Jesuit Gymnasium in Budapest. In 1906, he entered the University of Budapest, not as a physicist, but as a medical student; however, after two years he transferred to physics and mathematics. During the 1930s, Ortvay concentrated on physics, more as a teacher and as a missionary for the gospel of quantum physics than as a researcher. He kept up a correspondence with the emigre Hungarians and also other physicists, such as Pauli and Heisenberg. S. Ferenczi not only discusses anti-Semitism with Ortvay, a Roman Catholic, but advances his own theory as to some of its causes and compares it with anti-negro sentiments. By the time Ortvay was a young man in his mid-twenties, however, they clearly did know each other, as some of their correspondence survives. Two letters from Ferenczi to Ortvay can be found in the archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
