Rezső Tarján

From 1947 he worked at the United Light, and then for a short time he was the head of the Directorate of Information Technology. From the early 1950s he worked as the deputy head of the Postal Experimental Station, until February 1953. It was probably here that he met the postal engineer Tihamér Nemes, whom we respect as the pioneer of domestic cybernetics research.

In early 1955, he was the head of the Computing Department established for him at the Institute of Metrology and Measurement of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and then the deputy scientific director of the Cybernetics Research Group (KKCS) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, founded in the same year. (As is known, the first Hungarian electronic computer, the M-3 machine, was built in the KKCS – based on Soviet designs.)

He was the first and founding president of the National Technical Development Committee. He later earned a Doctor of Technical Science degree. In the 1960s, he worked first at the Department of Telecommunications of the Budapest University of Technology and then at the National Technical Development Committee (OMFB).

His outstanding merit is that from the second half of the 1950s, as the situation allowed, he gradually introduced the domestic professional public to numerous original results of cybernetics, information and communication theory, the general and logical theory of automata, and to such classics as János Neumann, M. Turing, CE Shannon, A. Kolmogorov and Norbert Wiener. His basic work, “Thinking Machines”, was published in 1958.

An award given by the Hungarian National Science Foundation to outstanding people in IT education bears his name.

In 1976, the NJSZT awarded him the Neumann Prize.