CONFERENCE ROOMS AND THEIR NAMESAKES
Kopátsy Sándor:
Sándor Kopátsy (Kaposvár, 1922 - Budapest, 2020) Hungarian economist.
The career of one of Hungary's best-known economists spans more than half a century, from economic reform programs to monitoring the privatization of the regime change to the creation of today's innovative economic approach.
He was born on February 27, 1922 in Kaposvár. Among his grandparents, only his paternal grandfather was Hungarian, whose wife was of German origin. His maternal grandparents were of Croatian nationality. His paternal grandfather got rich by building ornamental gardens for castles in the county of Somogy. However, the family became poor after the grandfather's death. He has three sons. His eldest son lives in Australia with his family. His middle son lives in Hungary, but his wife is Japanese. His youngest son lives in Paris, His Highness is French.
Sándor Kopátsy always attended elementary school where the teacher's mother was placed. He graduated from Kaposvár. He attended the Budapest University of Technology, but could not finish the university because of the war. In 1945, he became the secretary of the Peasants' Party. This was not only a workplace for him, but also became his spiritual home and the starting point of his later career. Csoma Kőrösi, playwright László Németh, writer Béla Hamvas, Sándor Karácsony, sociologist Ferenc Erdei, lawyer, politician, writer István Bibó, writer Péter Veres, writer József Darvas were his colleagues and mentors. In 1945, the situation seemed clear that after the defeat in 2 world wars and the collapse of the former Hungarian state, a modern Hungary based on completely new foundations had to be created. The nationalizations carried out in Great Britain and Austria, the land reform in Italy, the introduction of the planned economy in France, and the construction of the Swedish welfare state all showed that it is not only possible, but also necessary to develop an economic system based on state intervention. The leaders of the Peasants' Party considered the creation and implementation of a long-term vision to be the most important. In 1945 and 1946, the most acute crisis management, the rapid reconstruction after the war, the restart of the country and the management of the hyperinflation used to finance it were carried out by the greatest Hungarian economists, Nicolas Kaldor, Béla Csikós-Nagy, Jenő Varga and József Bognár.
The vision included the distribution of land, the modernization of Hungarian villages, the raising of the compulsory school age, the introduction of free health care, the modernization of the economy and public administration. However, the realization of the vision has already gone beyond the framework of neoclassical economics promoting free market competition. However, in Hungary, shortly after the Second World War, during the Soviet occupation of the country, a Soviet-type planned economy was introduced in 1949. Strong feudal and weak bourgeois traditions, market economy players constantly struggling with difficulties, and a country with severely deficient natural resource wealth faced the reality, weaknesses, priorities and war economy of the planned economy. The incompatible structures hindered the operation and modernization of the Hungarian economy for four decades. There is nothing left but the continuous reform of the system. During his long career, Sándor Kopátsy participated in all of them. The priorities changed during the reforms, but the compelling circumstances remained. Several Hungarian economists have dealt with the disturbances in the operation of the economic management system. Among others, János Kornai, Tibor Liska, Sándor Kopátsy.
Kodály Zoltán:
Zoltán Kodály (16 December 1882 – 6 March 1967) was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, music pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is well known internationally as the creator of the Kodály method of music education.
Born in Kecskemét, Hungary, Kodály learned to play the violin as a child.
In 1905 he visited remote villages to collect songs, recording them on phonograph cylinders. In 1906 he wrote a thesis on Hungarian folk song, "Strophic Construction in Hungarian Folksong". At around this time Kodály met fellow composer and compatriot Béla Bartók, whom he took under his wing and introduced to some of the methods involved in folk song collecting. The two became lifelong friends and champions of each other's music.
Throughout his adult life, Kodály was very interested in the problems of many types of music education, and he wrote a large amount of material on teaching methods as well as composing plenty of music intended for children's use. Beginning in 1935, along with his colleague Jenő Ádám (14 years his junior), he embarked on a long-term project to reform music teaching in Hungary's lower and middle schools. His work resulted in the publication of several highly influential books.
The goals of the Kodály method can summarized into the following points:
- Music is for everyone.
- Music teaching should be sequential and begin with the child in mind.
- Kids should be taught music from an early age.
- The sequence should be logical and follow the same process children learn language.
- Music classes should be enjoyable and engaging.
- Singing is the first and most valuable tool for learning musical concepts.
- Teachers should pull from quality folk song materials in the "mother tongue" of the students.
The Hungarian music education program that developed in the 1940s became the basis for the Kodály Method - these principles were widely taken up by pedagogues (above all in Hungary, but also in many other countries) after World War II. His practices also have evolved the Kodály hand signs.
Horváth Gyula:
Prof. Gyula Horváth graduated with the first year in 1974 from the seconded faculty of the Károly Marx University of Economics in Pécs. After obtaining his university diploma, he worked as a scientific assistant at the Transdanubian Institute of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He wrote his university doctoral thesis in 1977. From 1978, he became a scientific associate of the Transdanubian Institute of Science. In 1978 and 1982 he received the Academic Youth Award. He has been a member of ERSA since 1982. He defended his candidate thesis in 1987.
He was the author of 17 articles in the Discussion Papers series published by the MTA RKK. In the Tér és Társadalom magazine, founded in 1987, he published a study every year, a total of 23 articles.
From 1988, he taught at the Faculty of Economics of the Janus Pannonius University (now the University of Pécs) in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics. From 1992, he became the director of the RKK Transdanubian Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
During the study trips to Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, he began to research the most diverse areas of European regional politics. His interest turned to the examination of the regional policy of the European Communities and the European Union, and the regional political system of individual member countries (Italy, Great Britain, Ireland).
In 1996, he participated in the founding of the PTE Regional Politics and Economics Doctoral School. This model was later successfully applied at other Hungarian universities in Győr, Szeged, Gödöllő, Debrecen and Miskolc.
In relation to regional development, instead of the development of post-industrial, mass-producing traditional industrial sectors, regional economic development based on innovation and technological development outlined the factors of structure and development. The description of the government model based on the division of power between the state and regions and its role in its application in Hungary are of great importance.
Since 1993, he has been a member of the Regional Science Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, of which he was president from 2011 to 2015. Since 1997, the MTA RKK was its director general. He was one of the founders of the Hungarian Regional Science Society (MRTT), founded in 2002, and was its first president until 2011.
He was awarded the academic doctorate in 1999, and in 2000 habilitated. He became a university professor in 2001. In 2010, the Regional Studies Association (RSA) held its annual conference in Pécs, of which he was the main organizer. In addition to research, his scientific activity also included education, school construction, and the training and supply of specialists.
In 1998, he received the Scientific Award of the Academic Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Pécs, in 2001 he received the Academic Award, and in 2005 he received the Széchenyi Award.
He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 2002.
Bartók Béla:
Béla Bartók (25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology.
In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle. He entered it for a prize by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they rejected his work as not fit for the stage. For the remainder of his life, although devoted to Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much loyalty to the government or its official establishments.
After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition, Bartók wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music. He found the phonograph an essential tool for collecting folk music for its accuracy, objectivity, and manipulability. He collected first in the Carpathian Basin (then the Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk music. The developmental breakthrough for Bartok arrived when he collaboratively collected folk music with Zoltán Kodály through the medium of an Edison machine, on which they would study classification possibilities (for individual folk songs) and record hundreds of cylinders.
Bartok's compositional command of folk elements is expressed in such an authentic and undiluted a manner because of the scales, sounds, and rhythms that were so much a part of his native Hungary that he automatically saw music in these terms. The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the expeditions, but he returned to composing.
n 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was increasingly tempted to flee Hungary. He strongly opposed the Nazis and Hungary's alliance with Germany and the Axis powers under the Tripartite Pact. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bartók refused to give concerts in Germany and broke away from his publisher there. His anti-fascist political views caused him a great deal of trouble with the establishment in Hungary.
Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the U.S. Although he became an American citizen in 1945, shortly before his death, Bartók never felt fully at home in the United States. Béla Bartók died at age 64 in a hospital in New York City. Bartók's body was in the late 1980s transferred back to Budapest for burial, where Hungary arranged a state funeral for him on 7 July 1988.
Rechnitzer János:
Prof. János Rechnitzer (Hédervár, 1952 - 2023) Hungarian economist, regionalist, winner of the Academic Award (2017), one of the founding professors of Széchenyi István University, head of the Doctoral School of Regional and Economic Sciences, the Research Center for Economic and Regional Sciences scientific advisor. From 2021, professor emeritus and research professor emeritus. He is married and has three daughters.
He graduated from Miklós Révai High School in Győr in 1970. He graduated from the university in 1975 at the Part-time Department of the Károly Marx University of Economics in Pécs. Today, this is the Faculty of Economics of the University of Pécs. Between 1975 and 1982, he was a scientific assistant at the Transdanubian Institute of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1982 and 1986, he was the economic director of the Pollack Mihály Technical College, then a college associate professor.
Since 1986, he has been a senior researcher at the Regional Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He organized the North-Danubian Department of the MTA RKK, which received institute status in 1995. Between 1995 and 2007, he was the director of the West Hungarian Scientific Institute of the RKK of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was appointed university professor in 2000. Between 2002 and 2008, he was the dean of the newly established Széchenyi István University Faculty of Law and Economics.
In 2004, he founded the Multidisciplinary Social Sciences Doctoral School of István Széchenyi University, in which 140 candidates have obtained their doctorate degrees to date. From 2002, he was the head of the University's Department of Social Sciences, and then of the Department of Regional Studies and Public Policy until 2017. Between 2008 and 2012, he was the academic vice-rector of István Széchenyi University. Between 2008 and 2020, he was the head of the Doctoral School of Regional and Economic Sciences (RGDI) of István Széchenyi University. (2008-2020).
In 1978, he defended his university doctoral dissertation on the balance sheet of regional sectoral relations. That is why he received the Academy's Youth Award in 1979. He expanded the topic with various estimation procedures of the TÁKM. He was the first in Hungary to compile a territorial balance sheet. In his candidate's thesis defended in 1985, he analyzed the regional effects of air pollution. In his later researches, he examined the territorial connections of innovations. In 1995, he wrote his academic doctoral dissertation based on the theoretical and practical results of this. Its title is: Innovations shaping the spatial structure. Basic elements of innovation-oriented regional policy. In 1999, he obtained his habilitation in economics. The main areas of his scientific work: territorial planning, cross-border cooperation, theory and practice of territorial politics, territorial processes of transition, the innovation potential of the urban network, territorial innovation policy, the relationship between territorial capital and urban development, the economic and social effects of autonomous vehicles, East-Central -Development of Europe's big cities. The most important subjects taught at several universities: regional economics, territorial politics.
He was secretary (1993-1996), vice-president (1996-1997), and president (1997-2008, 2015-2017) of the Regional Sciences Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 2011 and 2017, he was the president of the Hungarian Regional Science Society. Editor-in-chief of Tér és Társadalom magazine (1994-2010), member of the editorial board (from 2010).
He received the Officer's Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit in 2022, the Regional Science Award in 2018, and the Academic Award in 2017. In 2014, he became an Honorary Citizen of the City of Győr County. In 2009, he received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.
Prof. Csatári Bálint:
Bálint Csatári (Karcag, August 13, 1949 – Kecskemét, September 17, 2019) Hungarian geographer, university lecturer, researcher of the social geography of the Great Plain. Married, father of three children.
He went to high school in Berettyóújfalu. In Szeged, József Attila University became a mathematics and geography teacher. In 1975, he obtained his doctoral degree at the doctoral school of geography. He returned to Berettyóújfalu, where he worked as a secondary school teacher until 1980. From 1980, he worked and researched as a scholar. In 1984, he was employed by the Kecskemét group of the Regional Research Center of the Academy of Sciences. 1992-2008. former director of the RKK Alföldi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 2008, he was a senior scientific associate of the institute and head of the Kecskemét Science Department. In addition to his research work, he was an associate professor at the Department of Economic and Social Geography of the University of Szeged. His area of expertise is the geography of settlements, the geography of rural areas, micro- and macro-regional developments.
The main subject of Bálint Csatári's research was the Great Plain, which he loved very much. He researched the driving forces and phenomena of the development of the lowland settlements and their society. His important research areas were the scattered settlements of the Great Plain, the development trajectory of farms and the problems of Hungary's lagging regions. During his public activities, he also stood up for the lagging areas and social strata. He was a regular participant in forums and organizations dealing with regional development.
Prof. Varga Attila:
Prof. Attila Varga (1958-2023) was born in Tatabánya. He completed his primary and secondary education here. He began his university studies in 1979 at the Faculty of Economics of JPTE. He received his degree in economics in 1983. In 1989, he obtained a university doctorate. In 1997, he obtained a PhD degree from the Department of Economics of West Virginia University (USA). From 1998 to 2001, he worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and was a senior research fellow at the Vienna University of Economics. He returned to Hungary in 2001. In 2006, he received a habilitation and a doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as well as a university professorship. In 2019, he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
As a university lecturer, he taught microeconomics, spatial economics and methodological issues of regional research at the University of Pécs. Between 2006 and 2012, he was the director of the Institute of Economics and Regional Sciences of PTE KTK, the founder of the Regional Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Center. In 2013, he became the head of the Doctoral School of Regional Politics and Economics. Under his leadership, the doctoral school became internationally known and visited by foreign students.
Attila Varga's scientific work began and was completed in the United States. His main research area was the sectoral and spatial characteristics of knowledge flows. He investigated how innovations, starting from universities and research institutes, spread in the geographical, economic and administrative space. The book version of his academic doctoral dissertation was published under the title "University research and regional innovation: spatial econometric analysis of scientific technology transfers”.
He has been researching the spatial factors of economic growth since the 2000s. He conducted his research with data from Hungary, the European Union and Turkey. The spatial economic impact analysis model was developed under his leadership. The results of his research work were also used in economic policy. His economic policy proposals focused on the development of R&D and human capital, business and innovation network policies, investment support for intelligent specialization, and infrastructure development.
He is one of the most cited Hungarian economists. The number of his references is almost 13,000.
In 2018, he received an Academic Award, in 2023 he was awarded the Order of Merit, and in 2023 he received an ERSA award.
Prof. Enyedi György:
Prof. György Enyedi (Budapest, August 25, 1930 – Budapest, September 10, 2012) Széchenyi Prize-winning Hungarian geographer, economist, university professor, full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, vice-president between 1999 and 2002. He was a renowned researcher of social geography and regional science.
He completed his secondary school studies at the Piarista High School in Budapest. In 1949, he began his university studies at the Károly Marx University of Economics, majoring in Regional Planning and Economic Geography, where he graduated in 1953. He obtained his university doctorate in 1958. He became a teaching assistant here. From 1955, he worked at Gödöllő University of Agricultural Sciences, where he first worked as a teaching assistant and then as an assistant professor. In 1960, he became a staff member of the Institute of Geography of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, then became head of department and deputy director. In 1983, he was appointed the founding director general of the Regional Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1991, he became a research professor at the institute.
Among others, he taught at the Lajos Kossuth University in Debrecen, where he is an associate professor, at the Janus Pannonius University in Pécs and at the Eötvös Loránd University. He retired in 2008.
In 1962, he defended his candidate's thesis in geography, and in 1975, he defended his academic doctoral thesis. He was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1982, and a full member in 1990. Between 1988 and 1996, during the transition, he was the international secretary of the academy. Since 1999, he has been a member of the European Academy in London. He was also the vice-president of the National Scientific Research Fund and the editor-in-chief of Hungarian Science, the scientific journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Between 1984 and 1992, he was vice-president of the International Geographical Union. Between 1998 and 2002, he was the president of the Hungarian UNESCO Commission. In Hungary, he was a decisive actor and shaper of both geography and regional science.
His field of research is regional science and social geography. In the course of his research, he examined the territorial inequalities of society and the characteristics of economic districts and regions (agricultural and industrial). His research on settlement networks is also internationally significant. He developed the concept of the village region. According to his theory, the rural area is not only a recipient or sufferer of urban influences, but also has its own development path: tourism, environmental protection, residence of city workers. While the traditional agricultural villages remained. His most important scientific achievement is the stages of urban development, the model of the urbanization cycle. In the period after the regime change, he investigated the spatial processes of the transition in Hungary. He played an outstanding role in the internationalization of Hungarian geography.
He received the Academic Award in 1961 and the Széchenyi Award in 1998 for his outstanding academic work in the field of domestic and international regional research. In 1994, he was awarded the Middle Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.
Liszt Ferenc:
Ferenc Liszt (German name Franz Liszt; Doborján, 1811 - Bayreuth, 1886) Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor and music teacher, one of the most important composers of 19th century romantic classical music.
His father, Ádám Liszt, was an official of Duke Esterházy. Ferenc Liszt's parents had German, Slavic and Hungarian ancestry. The family's mother tongue was German, Ferenc himself learned Hungarian only in his later years. Although he lived in many countries for longer or shorter periods of time, which he also considered his homeland, he always declared himself Hungarian and used a Hungarian passport as a Hungarian citizen. He recognized his son's exceptional musical talent early on and took every opportunity to develop it. At the age of nine, Liszt already played the piano in public in Sopron and Bratislava, and then continued his studies in Vienna. It was presented in Vienna on December 1, 1822. The first concert of the 11-year-old Liszt caused a great stir. Here he met Beethoven, who was a great role model of Ferenc Liszt. His first work, his variations on the Diabelli theme (circulation), was published here. Following his performance in Vienna, the young Liszt traveled to France with his father in the autumn of 1823, after four highly successful concerts in Pest and Buda, and moved to Paris, one of the centers of European artistic life.
He was not admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, so he returned to Vienna, where he studied music theory and counterpoint privately. His presentation in London was followed by several new invitations to France, Switzerland, and then again to England. His program mostly featured adaptations of popular operas. In 1827, he settled in the French capital for a while. Here he met Chopin, from whom he learned the nuances of playing the piano. He became one of the greatest piano virtuosos of his time. He met Berlioz, from whom he learned the orchestral language and the new achievements of program music.
At the end of the 1830s, he went on another concert tour, traveling all over Europe, from Portugal to Russia.
In 1835, he became a teacher at the Geneva Conservatory.
He supported the victims of the Pest flood disaster of 1838 with the income of his concerts in Vienna.
In the first half of the 1840s, Ferenc Liszt became known to the world as a virtuoso piano performer. Thanks to him, he brought many difficult pieces by Beethoven, Berlioz and Chopin to the stage.
During concert tours in Russia, he became acquainted with the art and love of Russian composers, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who later contributed to his literary work.
In the early forties, he became the conductor of the court theater in Weimar. For him, it was very important that he popularized and conducted the works of his contemporaries, as well as taught young musicians and composers. Liszt divided the last decades of his life between Weimar, Rome and Budapest.
He was the founding teacher, patron and president of the Budapest Academy of Music. The administrative tasks were carried out by another great Hungarian composer of the time, Ferenc Erkel, who composed the music for the National Anthem. In the first years of the Academy of Music, he willingly helped the newly emerging center of Hungarian music culture and undertook to teach here for a few months of each academic year. He offered a very significant amount from his private wealth for the construction of the Academy of Music building.
Liszt was an extremely prolific composer. He composed most of his works for the piano. But the big problem of his career as a composer and his art is that extraordinary technical knowledge is required to play his works. We can also say that as a composer he could not separate himself from his own virtuosity as a performer. He composed 400 original pieces, most of which are virtuoso piano pieces, symphonies, symphonic poems, and masses. He composed 1,400 works including arrangements, transcriptions, and arrangements. This makes him one of the most prolific composers of all time. He was an enthusiastic supporter of program music. He also dealt with musical transcriptions and tackled the most complex orchestral works, such as Beethoven's symphonies, which Berlioz described as instrumental dramas. This is what made Liszt's symphonic poems. According to Liszt, the symphony is the past, which must be replaced by the symphonic poem, which unites music and literature and is considered a higher genre. This meant renewing the musical way of thinking, replacing classical forms with new ones. This created a new world of harmony, thereby enhancing the descriptive, expressive, associative, symbolic and synesthetic abilities of music.
His works are indispensable elements of concert programs in all parts of the world. In addition to his musical work, he wrote many essays on various topics: the social position of composers, art analyses, etc.
In May 1861 in Paris III. Napoleon appointed him Commander of the Order of Honor. In 1865 IX. Pope Pius received him at a private hearing. In 1867, he was awarded the Ferenc József Order In 1886, British Queen Victoria received him in London, at Windsor Castle, and presented him with her marble bust.
He lived in Budapest, Vienna, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Weimar, Bayreuth. A world-knowned piano artist, composer and conductor, he was also an extremely generous patron.
Today, the Academy of Music in Budapest and the international airport bear his name. The most prestigious state award for the most prestigious music artists was named after him.
2024 RSAI WORLD CONGRESS
The 14th World Conference of the Regional Science Association International will be held from 8 to 11 April, 2024, at the John von Neumann University in Kecskemét, Hungary. It will be organized by the Hungarian Section of the Regional Science Association International.
The meeting is open to the world-wide regional science community and aims to bring together the key elements of multidisciplinary regional science research and to provide a scientific platform for presenting and discussing research at the frontiers of spatial sciences.
Topics such as agglomeration economies, urban-rural relations, migration, spatial and resources allocation, border effects, urbanization, sustainable cities, mobility, land use, environmental quality, disaster management, energy transition, cultural heritage, poverty, segregation, spatial modelling are important issues covered in the 2024 RSAI World Congress.
The congress will host countless exciting events, including special sessions and semi-plenary policy sessions.
Important Dates
30 NOV 2023 Deadline for Abstract/ Special Session Submission
15 DEC 2023 Notification of Abstract Acceptance
16 DEC 2023 Registration Opens
15 JAN 2024 Deadline registration at reduced fee
28 FEB 2024 Deadline registration for being included in the program
10 MAR 2024 Draft program
01 APR 2024 Final Program in electronic version
08-11 APR 2024 Conference & meeting