From Toan Truong via Threadreader, March 30:
This is Laszlo Polgar.
He's the psychologist who turned his 3 daughters into chess grandmasters at 15.
He had ZERO chess skills, but his daughters defeated prime Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparov, and Viktor Korchnoi.
Welcome to the first-ever Genius Factory: 🧵
In 1960s Communist Hungary, Laszlo Polgar had a radical theory:
Geniuses aren't born, they're made.
The establishment laughed. His peers called him crazy. So he decided to prove his theory with his own children...Before having kids, he placed a newspaper ad seeking a wife who would join his experiment.
Klara, a Ukrainian teacher, responded.
They married with one agreement: their children would be subjects in his educational experiment.
Their plan? Choose one field and immerse their children in it from early age.
The field: chess.
Not because they loved it (Laszlo barely knew the rules), but because success in chess was objectively measurable.
Their first daughter, Susan, was born in 1969.
By age 4, she spent 5 hours daily on chess with her father's custom method.
At 5, she solved a chess puzzle that stumped adults.
This was just the beginning.
Sofia came next in 1974, then Judit in 1976.
All three were homeschooled with chess as their core curriculum.
The Polgar home was transformed into a chess lab with 10,000+ chess books, filling their Budapest apartment.
The girls learned languages through chess books in English, Russian, German and Spanish.
They studied math through chess problems.
They built stamina through activities that enhanced chess-specific cognitive abilities....
....MUCH MORE, he's only getting started, the best is yet to come.
