László Polgár

László Polgár (born 11 May 1946) is a Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist. He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second-best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered the greatest female chess player ever, as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Zsuzsa became the Women's World Chess Champion.

He has written well-known chess books such as Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games and Reform Chess, a survey of chess variants. He is also considered a pioneer theorist in child-rearing, who believes "geniuses are made, not born". Polgár's experiment with his daughters has been called "one of the most amazing experiments…in the history of human education." He has been "portrayed by his detractors as a Dr. Frankenstein" and viewed by his admirers as "a Houdini", noted Peter Maas in the Washington Post in 1992.

Education and career

Polgár was born on 11 May 1946 in Gyöngyös, Hungary. He studied intelligence when he was a university student. He later recalled that "when I looked at the life stories of geniuses" during his student years, "I found the same thing...They all started at a very young age and studied intensively." He prepared for fatherhood before marriage, reported People Magazine in 1987, by studying the biographies of 400 great intellectuals, from Socrates to Einstein. He concluded that if he took the right approach to child-rearing, he could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius." In 1992, Polgár told the Washington Post: "A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius."