Lajos Pósa

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Lajos Pósa (also cited as Louis Pósa; * December 9, 1947 ) is a Hungarian mathematician who deals with graph theory and combinatorics .

Posa was the son of a mathematician and was considered a child prodigy. Paul Erdős , who was always on the lookout for new talent between his travels in Hungary, promoted him early on as his favorite student. Erdős says that he was very impressed by him when they first met in 1959, when he solved a problem in just half a minute while eating that Erdős used to say in his own words ten minutes: given (n +1) numbers less than or equal to 2n. Show that at least one pair from this set is relatively prime . Soon he was solving problems suggested by Erdős in graph theory and Ramsey theory , and at the age of 14 you could talk to him after Erdős like a trained mathematician.

In 1962 he gave new necessary conditions for the existence of Hamilton ways . Shortly before, his first joint publication with Erdős appeared.

Posa worked at the University of Budapest and the Alfred Renyi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . Later, to Erdős' disappointment, he turned entirely to mathematics education for children and young people. Some well-known Hungarian mathematicians are among his students (such as László Babai , Gábor Tardos and Imre Z. Ruzsa ).

In 2000 he received the Karolyi Simonyi Research Fellowship.

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Footnotes

  1. ^ Honsberger Mathematical Gems , MAA 1973. Honsberger heard the stories from Erdős himself when he attended the University of Waterloo in 1970.
  2. ↑ The theorem does not apply to n numbers, as the choice of n even numbers less than or equal to 2n shows
  3. ↑ Honsberger, loc. cit., p. 12
  4. ↑ And gave a simple proof of a necessary criterion found by Gabriel Dirac in 1952 , which is reproduced in Honsberger Mathematical Gems
  5. ↑ Béla Bollobás , Interview 2006, Newsletter Inst.Math.Sciences, National University of Singapore 2007
personal data
SURNAME Pósa, Lajos
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pósa, Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1947