Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Incredible Polgar Sisters

Episode Date: June 6, 2021

László Polgár was born just after World War II in Hungary. His field of study was the nature of human intelligence. After studying the lives of over 400 great intellectuals from throughout human history, he came to a startling conclusion: geniuses weren’t born, they were made. So he set about conducting an experiment on his own children. The results were astonishing. Learn more about Judit, Susan, and Sophia, the incredible Polgar sisters, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laszlo Polger was born just after World War II in Hungary. His field of study was the nature of human intelligence. After studying the lives of over 400 great intellectuals from throughout human history, he came to a startling conclusion. Geniuses weren't born, they were made. So he set about conducting an experiment on his own children, and the results were astonishing. Learn more about Judith, Susan, and Sophia,

the incredible Polger Sisters, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Masterclass. Have you ever wanted to learn how to play chess or perhaps just play better?

What if you could learn chess from the greatest player in history? The man who was world champion for over 21 years and had the highest chess rating in history, Gary Kasparov. He has a class on Masterclass, where he teaches you the game of chess. There are seven hours and 20 minutes of instruction divided over 29 videos, where he goes through different aspects of the game to help you improve yours. You can also learn poker from Phil Ivy, gymnastics from Simone Biles, and skateboarding from Tony Hawk.

You can start learning from the world's best for only $15 per month. Just go to everything-dash everywhere.com slash masterclass or click on the link in the show notes. The debate between whether nature or nurture is responsible for human development has been around for all of human history. Even today, you can still find people who will adamantly defend one side or the other. Laslo Polger definitely stood on the nurture side of the debate. He was a trained psychologist whose focus of study was human intelligence. He had done an extensive investigation on hundreds of people who were considered geniuses throughout history, everyone from Socrates to Einstein to Mozart. He wrote a book called Bringing Up Genius, which laid out all of his theories of education, child development, and how to make geniuses.

He explicitly stated, quote, genius equals work and fortunate circumstances. Geniuses are made, not born, unquote. He felt that anyone could become a genius in any field of sport, science, or the arts, if, you started your education at the age of three and began to specialize at the age of six. He wanted to put his theories to the ultimate test. He wanted to raise actual geniuses. The problem was he had no children of his own, and he didn't have a wife, which was a problem if he wanted to have kids of his own.

So he began discussing his plan with several women to see if there would be interested in taking part in his experiment. Eventually, he contacted another researcher in Ukraine named Clara. They exchanged letters with each other, and she was on board. with the program. They met each other in the Soviet Union, got married, and moved back to Budapest to begin their project. Granted, this isn't the greatest love story ever told. Nonetheless, they were both on board, and they were going to make genuces. Here is where I need to take a diversion to explain something about child prodigies. Child prodigies usually only exist in a few fields,

music, chess, and mathematics. Mozart is the classical example of a child prodigy. He was touring Europe and composing music before he was the age of 10. The current world chess champion Magnus Carlson became a grandmaster when he was only 15. Mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote a mathematical treatise at the age of nine. You don't see child prodigies in things like international diplomacy. You'll never wake up one day to find out that an 11-year-old wonderkin diplomat has brought peace to the Middle East. In other areas like sports, you can excel at an early age, but you can't really reach the pinnacle of success until you're an adult. Tiger Woods was a golf prodigy, but he was mostly just dominant at his own age levels.

What Laslo and Clara determined they would focus on with their children was chess. One of the reasons why they focused on chess was that it was objective. If they had focused on something like art, it would have been too subjective. Chess has winners and losers. There's a ranking system. It would be very easy to determine if their educational techniques worked. One of the biggest obstacles they had to overcome at first was getting approval from the communist government in Hungary to homeschool their children. Once they convinced them of the merits of what they were doing, everything was in place. Their first child, Susan, was born in 1969. He began teaching Susan chess at the age of four. He did

everything he could to make it a game and to be playful. By Susan's own account, she chose chess because she found the pieces to be like toys, and she had fun playing. In 1973, six months after she started, she made her public debut. Laslo took his daughter to the Budapest Chess Club. It was filled with old men and little four-year-old Susan had to sit on a pillow in order to reach the table. Laslo then invited the men assembled in the club to challenge his four-year-old daughter. They were all hesitant to play her at first, but soon she began beating almost all of them. At the age of five, Susan entered her first tournament and won 10-0. She soon became a local chess sensation, but everyone just assumed she was naturally gifted.

It was the exact opposite of what Laslo was trying to prove. Susan went on to an accomplished chess career. She became the third woman in history. to reach the rank of Grand Master, and she was the woman's world champion from 1993 to 1996. After her playing career was over, she went on to become the most successful collegiate chess coach in American history. She has coached teams to seven national championships. In 1974, Laslo and Clara had their second child, Sophia.

Like her older sister, she grew up in a house full of chess, and she too excelled at chess. Sophia was the runner-up in the under-14 world chess tournament at the age of 12. becoming the first girl ever to reach the finals. Two years later, she entered a tournament in Rome and won the tournament with an astonishing eight and a half out of nine points, beating several Grandmasters in the process. It was one of the most dominant performances in tournament history. Once, when former world champion Bobby Fisher visited the family in Budapest, she beat him

three games in a row. Sophia achieved the rank of International Master, which is just below the rank of Grandmaster. In 1976, Laslo and Clara had their third and final child. Judith. Of the three, Judith was unquestionably the best chess player. In 1991 at the age of 15 years and four months, she became the youngest grandmaster in history, beating the record set by Bobby Fisher. She became the youngest chess player in world history to break into the top 100 when she was ranked 55th in the world at the age of 12. By the time she was 15, she was the top ranked woman in the world. In 2002, she became the first woman to beat a reigning world champion when she beat

Gary Kasparov. In 2005, she became the first woman to break into the world's top 10, peaking at number eight. Yet, she never won a woman's world championship because she refused to play in women's only tournaments. She is unquestionably the greatest female chess player in history. It should be noted that the polger girls were not raised to be chess playing robots. They were also taught to be polygots, being taught Esperanto, German, Russian, and English, in addition to their native Hungarian. All three were also taught upper-levels. mathematics in addition to other normal school subjects. Plus, they were able to travel the world by attending chess tournaments. Likewise, all three sisters have gone on to have very normal

lives with families of their own. None have ever complained about their upbringing or have complained about their parents. Despite the results, none of the Polger sisters were ever forced to play chess. Laszlo and Clara created a home where the children could play and explore the curiosity. As Judith once said in an interview, quote, in the beginning it was a game. Later, chess for me became a sport, an art, a science, and everything together. I was very focused on chess and happy with that world. I was not the rebelling and going out type. I was happy that at home we were a closed circle, and then we went out playing chess and saw the world, unquote.

It should be noted that Laslo Polgar wasn't a great chess player. He was mediocre at best. But like Tiger Woods' father Earl, he and his wife provided an environment for his daughters to excel at something they loved. He set out to create the greatest family of chess players in history, and he did exactly that. Legend has it that after his daughters grew up and moved out, he wanted to adopt three more children from developing countries and go through the same process with them. However, his wife convinced him that there was more to life than chess, and the plan was abandoned. Laszlo's experiment has been called the greatest experiment in the history of education. The recent Netflix series, The Queen's Gambit, traces a fictional story of a chess prodigy named Beth Harmon who can't

came out of nowhere to become one of the greatest chess players in the world. What the Polger sisters showed is that it doesn't quite work that way. Great geniuses don't just happen. While there might be an element of genetic luck, whether it's Mozart, Tiger Woods, or Judith Polger, genius needs an environment to flourish in. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. Today's five-star review comes from listener JK You Know from Apple Podcasts in the United States.

They write, Let me tell you what I've learned. After binging to this show from the last few months, I am now the person that knows a little fact about almost everything and constantly brings up said facts in conversation. I can't tell if that's a good thing or if people think I'm a know-it-all, but I'll wait for an episode about self-awareness to help me decide. Thanks, Gary, I think. Well, thank you, JK, you know. As my uncle Ben once told me, with great knowledge comes great responsibility. Make sure you use your knowledge for good instead of evil, unless you can make money off of your friends doing it, in which case go for.

it. Remember, if you leave a five-star review, you too can have your review right on the show.