Person: Egerváry, Jenő
Jenő Egerváry was a Hungarian mathematician who worked in combinatorial optimisation. He committed suicide after the crushing of the Hungarian revolution.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- This famous school had opened in November 1873 and, when Egerváry studied there, the director was Sándor Fazekas.
- There were two teachers at this school who were important in developing Egerváry's mathematical interests.
- His duties were taken over by Károly Laczkó who prepared Egerváry's class, consisting of 22 students, for their final examination.
- The other mathematics teacher who strongly influenced Egerváry was Antal Kovaliczky (1851-1926).
- Egerváry performed well in all his subjects at the Fazekas Mihály State School and graduated in 1909.
- Lipót Fejér was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the Pázmány Péter University of Budapest in 1911 and he taught Egerváry in the second half of his undergraduate studies.
- Egerváry completed his undergraduate studies in 1913 and in the summer of that year he went to England on a study tour financed by a state grant.
- Following a suggestion by Fejér, Egerváry studied a class of integral equations of second kind in which the kernel is a periodic function and the matrix of the approximating system of algebraic equations is cyclic.
- After the award of his Ph.D., Egerváry was employed in the Seismological Observatory in Budapest but also worked for his qualifications as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.
- Egerváry was conscripted for military service in 1917 but, later that year was discharged as unfit to serve.
- Now it seems unlikely that Egerváry was physically unfit since he was a remarkable sportsman and mountaineer.
- After his discharge, Egerváry was employed again as a high school teacher at the Upper State Industrial School of Budapest.
- For the next two years the university operated in Budapest and Egerváry habilitated there with his dissertation Applications of Analysis (Hungarian) teaching at the university from 1919.
- He gives has name as "E Egerváry" on the first on these but as "Eugen von Egerváry" on the second.
- In 1927 Egerváry's right to lecture at the Ferenc József University was revoked.
- Certainly shortly after this Egerváry was teaching at the University in Budapest.
- In this separation Egerváry determined sectors in the complex plane, where each sector contains a root of the equation, and the sum of the angles of these sectors is of order π/2.
- Egerváry localized the roots in annulus form.
- describes the duality theorem for the weighted bipartite matching problem, which is called today the assignment problem, proves the integrality result, and develops the underlying idea of the first primal-dual type algorithm that is called throughout the literature the 'Hungarian Method', a name introduced by H Kuhn who actually used Egerváry's ideas to develop an efficient algorithm.
- For his outstanding mathematical contributions, in 1932 Egerváry was awarded the Gyula König Prize of the Eötvös Lóránd Mathematical and Physical Society.
- In the same year Egerváry was appointed to the Institute for Training Secondary School Teachers and he taught there until 1938 when he again became a docent, this time at the Technical University of Budapest submitting the dissertation Analysis and its mathematical and physical applications.
- In all the works of Egerváry and in his lectures there is an unmistakable striving for clarity, precision, and elegance.
- Soon he supplanted Egerváry as head of the Research Institute.
- Egerváry was honoured with the award of the Kossuth Prize in 1949 and again in 1953.
- After his retirement, Egerváry lived only a few weeks before he took his own life.
- Not long after Egerváry's death, his research department was dissolved and by the early seventies he and his results were rarely mentioned in mathematical circles apart from his relation to the Hungarian method.
- In 1999, the Bergamo University of Italy issued an Egerváry prize to Zhang Liwei of Dalien University of China.
- It was one of HORS' principal aims to reach a higher level recognition of Egerváry and applied mathematics as well.
- The Society organized a special memorial session for Egerváry on the 25th Conference of HORS and established the Egerváry medal for lifetime Operations Research achievements in 2004.
- Due to the efforts of HORS and former students of Egerváry, a statue of Egerváry was erected in the campus of the Technical University of Budapest in 2006.
- In 2007 Professors Emilio Spedicato and Tamás Rapcsák proposed a memorial celebration of Egerváry on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death.
- The latter event consisted of 9 lectures that partly covered the scientific activity of Egerváry.
- It is worth noting that between 1918 and 1921 Egerváry was a teacher at the State Industrial College which was one of the legal predecessors of the Budapest Tech college.
Born 16 April 1891, Debrecen, Hungary. Died 30 November 1958, Budapest, Hungary.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin Hungary
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
