László Lovász Honored by the European Academy of Sciences

The Erasmus Medal is one of the highest honors granted by the Academia Europaea (AE) for purely scientific achievements. It will be presented at the organization’s annual conference, which this year will be held on 16 October in Barcelona. There, Lovász will deliver the Erasmus Lecture titled The Beauty of Mathematics.

According to the AE’s citation, László Lovász is one of the most outstanding mathematicians of our time and the most influential theorist in discrete mathematics. He is a pioneer in exploring the interplay between computer science, discrete and continuous mathematics, and a master at uncovering surprising connections between seemingly distant fields. His elegant and powerful ideas have led to the emergence of new subfields across various disciplines.

The tribute highlights Lovász’s contributions to the development of linear programming, information theory, number theory, cryptography, functional analysis, probability theory, and statistical physics. Among his most notable achievements are the proof of the weak perfect graph conjecture, the proof of the Kneser conjecture, the Lovász local lemma, the Lenstra–Lenstra–Lovász lattice reduction algorithm, and the development of graph limit theory.

Lovász earned his Candidate of Mathematical Sciences degree in 1970, followed by a mathematics diploma from ELTE in 1971. He received his Doctor of Mathematical Sciences degree in 1977. At the age of 31, he was elected Academician in 1979 and Full Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1985. Until 1975, he worked as a Senior Research Fellow at ELTE’s Department of Geometry, then led the Department of Geometry at József Attila University in Szeged from 1975 to 1982. He returned to ELTE in 1982 and became Head of the Department of Computer Science in 1983.

He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Bonn (1984–1985), taught at Princeton University from 1987 and at Yale University from 1993, and joined Microsoft Research in 1999. He returned to Hungary in 2006 and led ELTE’s Institute of Mathematics until 2011. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. From 2014 to 2020, he served as President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

László Lovász delivering a plenary lecture at the 2023 CERME conference, held at ELTE’s Lágymányos campus

In addition to his research and teaching, he led the Budapest Knowledge Hub of Academia Europaea until 2024. He has received numerous awards, including the Wolf Prize (1999), Knuth Prize (1999), Gödel Prize (2001), and Kyoto Prize (2010). In 2021, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded him the Abel Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize for mathematics.

He has also received some of Hungary’s highest professional and scientific honors, including the Corvin Chain (2001), the Bolyai Prize (2007), and the Széchenyi Grand Prize. He also served as President of the International Mathematical Union. To date, his name is associated with 12 books and 318 scientific publications.

Source: elte.hu