Sándor Varga

His uncle, Jenő Varga, was the People's Commissar of Finance of the Soviet Republic, forcing the family to emigrate. He first studied painting in Paris (including at the Académie de Grande Chaumière, 1922-24), then in the 1930s he joined the part of his family that had emigrated to the Soviet Union, where Jenő Varga was already a highly respected academician economist. Here he obtained a technical degree and worked in leading positions in the military industry.

After returning to Hungary, he worked in the state administration under Ernő Gerő, and in the 1950s he was head of the Soviet relations department at the Secretariat for International Economic Relations.

In the first half of 1956, he became involved in activities related to electronic computing. He prepared a proposal for the meeting of the Presidium of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (July 14, 1956) entitled "Proposal for the Promotion of the Development and Application of Cybernetics in Hungary". Based on this, a resolution was passed to establish the Cybernetics Research Group (KKCS) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, of which he was appointed the first director (Rezső Tarján became his deputy).
After the failure of the delivery of the Ural machine ordered by the Communist Party of Hungary in September 1956, in the spring of 1957 Varga and Tarján made a several-week trip to the Soviet Union, during which - using his connections and the authority of his uncle - they signed cooperation agreements with all the major computer research centers. In this context, they obtained the complete documentation of the newly completed but not yet mass-produced M-3 machine. The delivery of the documentation took place at the end of 1957 within the framework of academic cooperation; the construction of the machine, which Varga supervised, was completed in 1959.

After his relationship with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences deteriorated, the Academy terminated his employment in March 1960. He spent the short time remaining until retirement as an employee of the Library of the Budapest University of Technology (BUTE).