Person: Kovács, László
László Kovács was a Hungarian mathematician who worked in group theory.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Kovács received a Commendation in 1953-54 and a prize in each of 1954-55, 1955-56, 1956-57 and 1957-58.
- He did excellent work on abelian groups and ring theory (for which he received the Kossuth prize in 1952) and he gave Kovács a deep love of algebra.
- He reviewed Kovács' first paper, written while he was an undergraduate, A note on regular rings (1956).
- After graduating from Debrecen in 1958, Kovács went to England to undertake research with Bernhard Neumann.
- The address that Kovács gives on this paper is 'University College of North Staffordshire, Keele, Staffordshire'.
- Kovács continued to undertake research for his doctorate, advised by Bernhard Neumann.
- Kovács gives his address as 'University College of North Staffordshire' on this paper, submitted for publication to the Royal Society of London in September 1960.
- His first task at the Australian National University was to build a strong Department of Mathematics and, as part of this strategy, Kovács joined the Department of Mathematics in the Research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian National University in 1963.
- After his early contributions to abelian groups and ring theory, Kovács made important contribution to varieties of groups.
- However, Kovács's interests soon became wide ranging and he wrote many beautiful papers on a wide number of different topics.
- He gave a talk about his work at the conference 'Groups-Korea '94 (Pusan)' and Kovács was in the audience.
- Kovács became interested, discussed these problems with Craig and was extremely helpful to him.
- After the conference Kovács managed to answer one of Craig's open problems, constructing examples of inefficient perfect groups and publishing his examples in the paper Finite groups with trivial multiplicator and large deficiency (1995).
- Kovács was honoured by receiving the B H Neumann Award from the Australian Mathematics Trust in a ceremony in Canberra in April 1993.
- On 24 May 2003, Kovács received an honorary doctorate from the University of Debrecen.
- In 2001, Kovács retired but continued his mathematical work as a Retired Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.
Born 18 August 1936, Budapest, Hungary. Died 28 July 2013, Brisbane, Australia.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Group Theory, Origin Hungary
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
