Person: Hunyadi, Jeno

Jenő Hunyady was a Hungarian mathematician noted for his work on conic sections and linear algebra, specifically on determinants.

Dramatic events were taking place in Hungary when Hunyadi was a young boy.
Hunyadi was young enough to escape from the worst of these problems and was able to continue his education in Pest.
After graduating from secondary school, Hunyadi entered the Technical College of Pest where he studied mathematics.
It was the lecture courses given by Kummer and Kronecker which had the greatest influence on Hunyadi.
Hunyadi submitted his doctoral thesis on the theory of algebraic curves to the University of Göttingen in 1864 and in the following year, after eight years away from his native Hungary, he returned to Pest.
The mathematical level began to rise steadily and Hunyadi contributed to this improvement.
Since that time outstanding mathematicians such as Hunyadi, Julius König, Kürschák and Rados have contributed to the high standard of mathematical education at the Technical University.
In 1867 Hunyadi was elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and two years later he became a mathematics professor at the Technical University.
Hunyadi worked mainly on geometrical topics and his contributions were not to produce new theories but rather to improve the methods of others by simplifying proofs, finding elegant proofs to replace non-transparent ones, and putting apparently unrelated results into a general setting.
Some of Hunyadi's most significant results concern determinants.

Born 28 April 1838, Pest, Hungary. Died 26 December 1889, Budapest, Hungary.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Hungary

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive