The Founder

George Soros was born in Budapest in 1930. In 1947 he immigrated to Great Britain where he graduated from the London School of Economics. In 1956 he relocated to the United States.

In 1984 he founded the Hungarian secretariat of the Soros Foundation under the name Hungarian Academy of Sciences - Soros Committee, which has been operating independently under the Soros Foundation name since 1991. Over the following 15 years it was followed by a string of other foundations.

Soros is well-known not only as a financier and donor but also as a thinker. He devotes a lot of attention to the process during which open societies can be created in the post-communist world. In addition to a number of articles on political and economic changes in Eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union, George Soros also authored The Alchemy of Finance, Opening the Soviet System, Underwriting Democracy, Soros on Soros, and The Crisis of Global Capitalism.

In 1980 George Soros was awarded the title of honorary doctor by the New School for Social Research, New York, and Oxford University. In 1991 the University of Economic Sciences, Budapest, and Yale University conferred the same title on him. In 1995 he was awarded Laurea Honoris Causa by the University of Bologna in recognition for his worldwide efforts to create open societies.