Nemes Békésy György emlékezete

Békésy arranged his experiments with great care and often sought the opinion of those around him. It indicates a very important personality trait: I think, he was fully aware of the limitations of his knowledge and endeavoured to expand it through community discussions. Like Hungarian personalities who went abroad, he changed his first name to Georg (instead of Hungarian György); he used the noble forename “von” characteristic for German-speaking regions, and this is how he appears in his dissertations. He used his surname in its Hungarian form, having accents on the letters é. In 1961, nobleman Georg von Békésy received the Nobel Prize in Medicine: “for his discoveries of the physical mechanisms of stimulation within the cochlea”. The essence of Békésy’s discovery is the clarification of the energy conversion process in the cochlea. He succeeded in designing devices for measuring all mechanical functions of the hearing organ and transferred them to numerical data. This study concerns the genealogy of Georg von Békésy.