Ivan Moscovich

Ivan Moscovich was born in 1926 in Novi Sad, a city of what was then Yugoslavia. His Jewish parents were from Hungary. His fame comes from having invented many games and educational toys that are still considered valuable today. He died last year, in 2023, at the age of 96.

He was interned in 1943 at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and two more camps. He survived to the end of the war, lived for a time in Sweden to recover, finished his studies at the University of Belgrade and went to live in Israel.

At 95 he held an art exhibition at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York. The figures were made mechanically and by the rules of mathematics.

Works of art made in collaboration between man and machine. These works were made with a machine invented by Ivan Moscovich called the 'Harmonograph', and he himself was deeply attached to the art of mathematics.

An important particularity of this machine is that no two figures are alike; each and every one is independent. This interest of Ivan Moscovich in the art of mathematics seems a little strange, because mathematics helps us analyse and classify with precision everything that exists. But art, according to Prof. Marshall McLuhan (a Canadian Jew who foresaw the internet 30 years before it was invented), is to produce everything that can be made.

In Israel he worked as a scientific researcher, and in 1964 he founded the museum of 'Science and Technology' in Tel Aviv. Even though this museum did not live long, it led to science museums opening all over the world, such as the 'Exploratorium' in San Francisco and 'MoMath' in Manhattan. Apart from this famous centre, his works decorated the museums of Berlin, London and many other capitals. Thanks to these exhibitions, today's generations, who are not very aware of the Holocaust, are taking an interest in the subject, above all through these survivors, of whom so few remain. His works interested almost everyone, from children of 4 to people of 104. Moscovich says 'it is a rare thing for mathematics, science and art to mix in such a harmonious way'.

His star shone when he was in a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, eating for dessert a cookie in which there was a slip of paper with advice that said: 'Sell your ideas, because without any doubt they will be accepted.' That is how he began to invent games and toys based on mathematics, science and art. But he does not forget to add: 'Everything in life is connected. If I had not been in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen or the other camps, and if I had not had hope, a goal to live for, I don't know whether I would be the same Moscovich. The same symptoms that Primo Levi had, who after the war killed himself at 43, I had too. But I saved myself because I needed to let it out, and that made me an inventor.'