Béla Bollobás

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Béla Bollobás

Béla Bollobás (born August 3, 1943 in Budapest ) is a Hungarian-British mathematician who deals with graph theory , combinatorics , percolation theory and functional analysis .

life and work

As a student, Bollobás won two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad . He studied at the University of Budapest , where he received his doctorate on discrete geometry in 1967 with László Fejes Tóth and Paul Erdős . He then spent a year in Moscow with Israel Gelfand and a year at Oxford University (Christ Church College), before going to Cambridge University , where he again received his doctorate in functional analysis in 1972 under the topologist John Frank Adams (Banach algebras and the theory of numerical ranges). Since 1970 he has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Since 1996 he has been a professor at theUniversity of Memphis (Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence in Combinatorics), but remained a Fellow of Trinity College, where he has been a Senior Research Fellow since 2005. From 1982 to 1994 he was a regular visiting professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge .

Bollobás dealt with graph theory ( extreme graphs , random graphs , graph polynomials ), discrete geometry, functional analysis and the theory of percolation , where he applied methods from the theory of random graphs. He was the first to prove theorems about the exact structure of the phase transitions in random graphs, a field of research in which Erdős and Alfréd Rényi were pioneers in the 1950s. Bollobás' interest in it arose from Erdős when he was with him for a longer stay in Cambridge. He wrote over 350 research articles and several research monographs (including extreme graphs in 1978, which up until then had been studied mainly in Hungary, and random graphs in 1985) and textbooks. He also reissued John Edensor Littlewood's Mathematicians miscellany in expanded form and was administrator of Littlewood's written estate. He met Littlewood in Cambridge, where his wife Gabriella Bollobás, a painter and sculptor, made several busts of Dirac. Bollobas was also a friend of Paul Dirac , whose wife was Hungarian (the sister of Eugene Paul Wigner ).

At the University of Cambridge (fencing) and in Oxford ( Pentathlon ) Bollobas also made an athletic appearance.

In 2007 he received the Senior Whitehead Prize and in 2017 the Széchenyi Prize . He is a foreign member of the Polish and Hungarian Academy of Sciences , Fellow of the Royal Society (2011) and the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the Academia Europaea since 2017 .

In 2016 he proved with Balister and Morris that there is a sharp threshold for the choice of numbers that are randomly selected from (with a large ) , so that there is a high probability that a partial sequence of the numbers exists in which the product of the numbers is a square is (presumption by Carl Pomerance ).

His doctoral students include Keith M. Ball , Imre Leader , Oliver Riordan , Timothy Gowers , Robert Morris , József Balogh and Reinhard Diestel .

Fonts

  • Extremal Graph Theory. Academic Press 1978, Dover 2004.
  • Graph theory- an introductory course. Springer 1979.
  • Random graphs. Academic Press 1985. Cambridge University Press 2001.
  • Combinatorics - set systems, hypergraphs, families of vectors, and combinatorial probability. Cambridge University Press 1986.
  • Linear Analysis - an introductory course. Cambridge University Press 1990, 1999.
  • with Alan Baker , András Hajnal (ed.): A tribute to Paul Erdös. Cambridge University Press 1990.
  • (Ed.): Probabilistic combinatorics and its applications. American Mathematical Society 1991.
  • with Andrew Thomason (Ed.): Combinatorics, Geometry and Probability- a tribute to Paul Erdös. Cambridge University Press 1997.
  • Modern Graph Theory. Springer 1998.
  • (Ed.): Contemporary Combinatorics. Springer and Janos Bolyai Mathematical Society, Budapest 2002.
  • with Oliver Riordan: Percolation. Cambridge University Press 2006.
  • The Art of Mathematics - Coffee Time in Memphis. Cambridge University Press 2006 (with drawings by his wife Gabrielle Bollobás)
  • with Robert Kozma, Dezső Miklós: Handbook of Large-Scale Random Networks. Springer 2009.
  • with Paul Balister, Robert Morris : The sharp threshold for making squares , Annals of Mathematics, Volume 188, 2018, pp. 49–143, Arxiv

literature

  • Graham Brightwell et al. a. (Ed.): Combinatorics and probability. Celebrating Béla Bollabás's 60th birthday. Cambridge University Press 2007.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Officially at Fejes Toth. In an interview in 2006, Bollobás called Erdős his “real doctoral supervisor”, whom he had known since the age of 14 (Erdős invited him after he won the national mathematics competition) and with whom he had frequently corresponded and had problems since then. He published with Erdős as a student.
  2. ^ In addition, he spent a year in Cambridge as a student on the recommendation of Erdős.
  3. ↑ He already practiced this sport in Hungary, where it was a kind of national sport in higher circles. His great-uncle had a fencing academy.
  4. ^ Fellows Directory: Béla Bollobás. Royal Society, accessed October 28, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Directory of members: Béla Bollobás. Academia Europaea, accessed October 28, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Bollobás, Béla
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest