Radu Luchian(ov):
Thank you, George Soros
(and to the Open Society Foundation)
Open Society Foundation Homepage
| My comments on the Foundation
Letter I sent to AUBG for George Soros in July 2024
Dear Mr. Soros,
I'm writing to you from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to say a big Thank You for your generous support which impacted my whole life.
I was born in Romania, and I had your Foundation's help at the American University in Bulgaria (graduated in 1996) and at New Bulgarian University (graduated in 2000). Due to your ideas on an Open Society and your generosity to the two higher education institutions mentioned above, I had the privilege to study in a different country and visit many others, something normally extremely difficult in the Eastern Block of the 1990, and almost impossible even a decade earlier.
I met my wife at AUBG and we had our son at NBU.
Before AUBG my passion for computing automation was applied to the physics of construction, building research. The liberal education AUBG promotes, due in great part to your guidance at the creation of the school, almost literally showed me the world. Not like Aladdin on his carpet rides, but physically as well as in abstract depth, as I applied software to journalism, archaeology, psychology, perception, experiment design, cognitive modelling, documentation, digital media, web design.
These days I work from home, in cyber-security, consulting for small and large companies, governments, banks and other organisations in North America, Europe and all over the world, as well as global ones like Nestle and Coca-Cola. Whenever I can, I spread the open heart, mind and society ideals: helping customers and my company, friends and strangers. I keep learning, keep sharing what I learn, and a lot of it is due to the help and inspiration you provided.
I only met you in person a couple of times on your visits to Bulgaria, but your generous work through your Foundation has helped me grow for almost a decade of my formative years, almost as much as Joseph Campbell's take on global mythologies.
From the bottom of my heart,
Thank you Mr. Soros.
Radu Luchianov
Facts as of 2000
International philantropist George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1930. He emigrated to England in 1947 and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. In 1956, he moved to the United States.
Mr. Soros founded the Open Society Fund in 1979, the Soros Foundation -- Hungary in 1984, and the Soros Foundation -- Soviet Union in 1987. He now has a network of foundations operating in 24 countries throughout Central and Eastern Europe, as well as South Africa and the United States. These foundations are helping to build the infrastructure and institutions of an open society through the support of a variety of educational, cultural, and economic restructuring activities. The kind of open society that could lead to the Utopia of a really Global Earth, with reduced large-scale conflict and improved communication. The OSF support of the Internet (connection funds for universities, libraries, even individuals), with its potential of creating a Global Village is a definite highlight of that effort.
Mr. Soros is also founder of The Central European University in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw. Established in 1990, the University offers postgraduate programs in history, economics, political science, art history, and the social sciences, and serves as the centerpiece of Mr. Soros' educational initiatives in Eastern Europe.
Out of these initiatives, two have literally shaped my life:
, included -again- my scholarship; this time I was exposed to the content of 4 years or more of that beautifully crafted curriculum in 2 years and a half.
Mr. Soros is President of Soros Fund Management and Chief Investment Advisor to Quantum Fund N.V., a ¤12 billion international investment fund which is generally recognized as having had the best performance record in the world during its 25-year history.
In addition to many articles on the political and economic changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Mr. Soros is the author of the The Alchemy of Finance, published by Simon & Schuster in 1987 and republished be Weidenfeld & Nicholson in July 1990, and Underwriting Democracy, published by The Free Press in September 1991. Mr. Soros' last book (that I know of), Ideas and Actions, was published by Wiley and Sons in July, 1995.
Mr. Soros received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York) and the University of Oxford in 1980, as well as from the Budapest University of Economics and Yale University in 1991.
But none of that compares with the dedication to progress he has shown throughout his "funding career". For the period the Open Society Foundation operated, he has directly or indirectly helped more struggling scientists and funded more students than any government in Eastern Europe.
For myself, all it boils down to is a hearty: