Average IQ in Hungary

Hungary's average IQ of 97 barely hints at the country's staggering intellectual output relative to its size. With 13 Nobel Prize winners from a population of just 10 million, Hungary has one of the highest per-capita rates of Nobel laureates in the world, particularly in physics, chemistry, and economics. The Hungarian education system has a storied tradition of developing exceptional mathematical talent. The KöMaL mathematical journal, which has published challenging problems for students since 1894, has trained generations of analytical thinkers. Many of the 20th century's most influential mathematicians and physicists — including John von Neumann, Paul Erdős, and Edward Teller — were products of the Budapest mathematical school. Hungary's unique linguistic environment — Hungarian is unrelated to its neighbors' Indo-European languages — may contribute to the cognitive flexibility of its population. The challenge of learning this complex, agglutinative language from birth exercises linguistic and analytical faculties in distinctive ways that may carry over to other forms of cognitive performance.