Arpad Duka-Zolyomi
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* Bratislava, May 8, 1941 – † Budapest, July 26, 2013 / reactor physicist, politician ; ; Son of Norbert Duka-Zólyomi, brother of Emese Duka-Zólyomi. He completed his primary school education in Taksony and high school in Galánta in 1958. Due to his origin, he was not admitted to university, so he worked as a manual laborer in Bratislava for years, and after completing his compulsory military service in the Czech Republic, he was able to begin his studies at the Faculty of Nuclear Physics of the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he obtained an engineering degree in 1968. As a university student, he was the president of the Ady Endre Student Association (AED) of Hungarian students in Prague between 1964–1967. Together with Miklós Duray, he played a decisive role in the reorganization of the Hungarian youth movement in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 1960s. From 1968 he worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Nuclear Physics of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Comenius University in Bratislava. Between 1976 and 1989 he worked at the Neutron Physics Laboratory of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna (Soviet Union). He is the author of about eighty scientific papers on neutron physics, low radioactivity and nuclear fission. He began his political career in the Coexistence Political Movement, of which he was vice-president between 1991 and 1998. Between 1992 and 2004, he was a representative of the National Council of the Slovak Republic in Bratislava, from 1998 to 2005 he was the vice-chairman of the Hungarian Coalition Party, and from 2004 to 2009 he was a member of the European Parliament in Brussels. Between 1998 and 2004, he also served as the chairman of the Slovak-Hungarian group of the Interparliamentary Union. He retired in 2009. He contributed to the establishment of the Bratislava cyclotron center and the acquisition of a positron emission tomograph at the Cancer Hospital on Heyduk Street. He also took an active role in organizing the cultural life of the Hungarian community in Bratislava, and between 1991 and 2003 he was a member of the Csemadok OV and until his death he was the chairman of the Bratislava city organization of the Csemadok.