László Lovász (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈlaːsloː ˈlovaːs], born March 9, 1948) is a Hungarian mathematician, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the Wolf Prize and the Knuth Prize in 1999.

In high school, Lovász won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (in years 1964, 1965, 1966) and so did his son in 2008.[1]

Lovász received his Candidate of Sciences degree in 1970 at Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His advisor was Tibor Gallai.

Lovász was a professor at Yale University during the 1990s and was a collaborative member of the Microsoft Research Center until 2006. Now he has returned to Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he is the director of the Mathematical Institute.

He has served as president of the International Mathematical Union since January 1, 2007.[2]

Lovász was awarded the Bolyai prize in 2007 and Hungary's Széchenyi Grand Prize (2008). He received the Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (2008). He was elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2007), honorary member[3] of the London Mathematical Society (2009). He received the Kyoto Prize for Basic Science (2010). Lovász is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.[4]

Lovász wrote a paper with Paul Erdős, a mathematician who was famous for writing papers with co-authors, which earned Lovász the Erdős number of one.

Books

He co-authored or edited the following books:

* Lovász L., Pelikán J., Vesztergombi K.: Kombinatorika, Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 1977
* Gács P., Lovász L.: Algoritmusok, Müszaki Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1978; Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 1987
* L. Lovász: Combinatorial Problems and Exercises, Akadémiai Kiadó - North Holland, Budapest, 1979 , revised: Elsevier, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993, reprint: AMS Chelsea Publishing, 2007.
* L. Lovász, M.D. Plummer: Matching Theory, Akadémiai Kiadó - North Holland, Budapest, 1986
* L. Lovász: An Algorithmic Theory of Numbers, Graphs, and Convexity, CBMS-NSF Regional Conference Series in Applied Mathematics 50, SIAM, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1986
* M. Grötschel, L. Lovász, A. Schrijver: Geometric Algorithms and Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, 1988
* B. Korte, L. Lovász, R. Schrader: Greedoids, Springer, 1991
* Ronald L. Graham, , M. Grötschel, L. Lovász (eds.): Handbook of Combinatorics Elsevier Science B.V., 1995
* L. Lovász, J. Pelikán, K. Vesztergombi K.: Discrete Mathematics: Elementary and Beyond, Springer, New York, 2003

See also

* Topological combinatorics
* Lovász conjecture
* Erdős–Faber–Lovász conjecture
* Lovász local lemma
* LLL algorithm
* Geometry of numbers
* Perfect graph theorem
* Greedoid
* Bell number
* Lovász number

Notes

1. ^ Laszlo Miklos Lovasz
2. ^ The IMU Executive Committee 2007-2010
3. ^ LMS homepage
4. ^ Thomson ISI, Lovász, László, ISI Highly Cited Researchers, http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/author.cgi?&id=1301, retrieved 2010-02-02

External links

* Lovász's Homepage
* László Lovász at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
* László Lovász's results at the International Mathematical Olympiad

Mathematicians