Person: Lovász, Laszlo
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- When he was fourteen years old, Lovász came across an article by Paul Erdős in the Mathematical and Physical Journal for Secondary Schools (1962) and was so enchanted that he read it "at least twenty times".
- Inspired by Erdős, Lovász won gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad competition in each of the three years 1964, 1965 and 1966.
- Lovász's first paper On graphs not containing independent circuits was published in 1965 when he was seventeen years old.
- After graduating from high school, Lovász studied at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and he was awarded a Candidate Degree of Mathematical Science (C.Sc.) in 1970 by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.
- Remarkably, Lovász had fifteen papers in print by the time he was awarded his Candidate Degree in 1970.
- For his outstanding achievements, Lovász received the Grünwald Géza Prize from the Bolyai Society in 1970.
- In 1993 Lovász gave up the Chair of Computer Science at Eötvös Loránd University but retained a professorship there.
- He is perhaps best known for the widely used 'LLL algorithm' named after Arjen K Lenstra, Hendrik W Lenstra and László Lovász who first gave the algorithm in their joint paper Factoring Polynomials with Rational Coefficients (1982).
- Lovász also contributed to the PCP characterization of NP and its connection to the hardness of approximation.
- Before looking at further honours and prizes awarded to Lovász we give details of the outstanding books, both research monographs and teaching texts, he has written.
- Two years later Lovász published (with Martin Grötschel and Alexander Schrijver) Geometric algorithms and combinatorial optimization (1988); a second edition appeared in 1993.
- In addition to the Grünwald Géza Prize mentioned above, Lovász was awarded: the George Pólya Prize in 1979; the Best Information Theory Paper Award from the IEEE in 1981; the Ray D Fulkerson Prize awarded jointly to Lovasz, Grötschel and Schrijver for their paper The ellipsoid method and its consequences in combinatorial optimisation (1981); the State Prize, Hungary in 1985; the Tibor Szele Medal from the Bolyai Society in 1992; the Brouwer Medal from the Dutch Mathematical Society in 1993; the National Order of Merit of Hungary in 1998; the Bolzano Medal from the Czech Mathematical Society in 1998; the Wolf Prize, Israel in 1999; and the Knuth Prize in 1999.
- The Lovász Local lemma, Lattice Basis Reduction - finding short vectors in lattices, and the application of the ellipsoid method for various convex programming problems have all become standard tools in a wide range of areas of algorithms and complexity.
- Lovász's contribution to the connection between hardness of approximation and probabilistic proofs was essential.
- In addition to his fundamental contributions in algorithms Laci Lovász has also written a number of beautiful books all emphasizing algorithms in a variety of topics.
- In 2006 the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences awarded Lovász its John von Neumann Theory Prize.
- Lovász has also made key contributions to many topics in graph theory using novel techniques, to randomized algorithms and to submodular function minimization.
- Lovász will become the President of the International Mathematical Union next year.
- Lovász was awarded the János Bolyai Research Prize in 2007, elected to the Swedish Academy of Sciences in the same year, and awarded Hungary's Széchenyi Grand Prize on 15 March 2008.
- In November 2008 Lovász was awarded the Bolyai Grand Prize of the János Bolyai Foundation and, on 3 July 2009, he was elected an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society.
Born 9 March 1948, Budapest, Hungary.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Abel, Origin Hungary, Prize Wolf
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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
