László Lovász

László Lovász defended his candidate dissertation in 1970 and his academic doctoral dissertation in 1977. After this, he became a member of the Mathematical and Operations Research Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). He was elected as a corresponding member of the MTA in 1979 and a full member in 1985, and in 2008, he became a member of the MTA Presidium. Between 1987 and 1994, he was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), and from 2007 to 2010, he served as its president.

Additionally, from 2004 to 2006, he was a member of the five-member evaluation committee for the Abel Prize. From 2014 to 2020, he was the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1981, together with Paul Erdős and László Babai, he founded the journal Combinatorica, and in 1985, he co-founded the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program for American undergraduate students. His primary research areas are combinatorics and computer science. He is known for the Lovász Local Lemma, the Lovász Basis Reduction Algorithm (part of the Lenstra–Lenstra–Lovász (LLL) algorithm), and the development of the algorithmic theory of convex bodies and lattices. Since the early 2000s, he has played a leading role in the development of graph limit theory. Since 2018, he has been the coordinator of a six-year international project focused on the mathematical description of the characteristics of dynamically changing networks. He is the author or co-author of more than 370 scientific publications and 12 books. He is the most cited Hungarian mathematician, ranking 15th on the global Research.com list with 51,917 citations and an H-index of 100. For his internationally significant scientific work, he has received numerous professional and state awards, among the most important of which are:

  • Grünwald Géza Prize (1969)
  • Pólya Prize (SIAM, 1979)
  • Fulkerson Prize (Mathematical Programming Society, 1982)
  • State Prize (1985)
  • Brouwer Medal (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
  • Bolzano Medal (Czech Mathematical Society)
  • Wolf Prize (Wolf Foundation, 1999)
  • Gödel Prize (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, 2001)
  • John von Neumann Theory Prize (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, 2006)
  • János Bolyai Creative Prize (2007)
  • Széchenyi Grand Prize (2008)
  • Kyoto Prize (2010)
  • Abel Prize (2021)
  • Corvin Chain (2001)
  • Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen (2021) László Lovász is a member of numerous foreign scientific academies and an honorary doctor of several universities.
Updated: 14.06.2024.