Béla Bollobás

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

Life and work

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

Bollobás dealt among other things with Graph Theory ( extremal graphs, random graphs, Graphenpolynome ), discrete geometry, functional analysis and the theory of percolation, where he applied methods from the theory of random graphs. He proved the first theorems on the exact structure of the phase transitions in random graphs, a field of research on the Erdős and Rényi Alfréd in the 1950s were pioneers. Bollobás ' interest in it was created by Erdős, as this was a longer stay in Cambridge with him. He has authored over 350 research articles and several research monographs (including through Extremal graphs 1978, which until then had been mainly studied in Hungary, and random graphs, 1985) and textbooks. He also gave John Edensor Littlewood's miscellany Mathematicians in expanded form new out and was manager of Littlewoods correspondence and papers. He learned Littlewood yet know in Cambridge, where his wife Gabriella Bollobás, a painter and sculptor, several busts of Dirac produced. Bollobás was also a friend of Paul Dirac, whose wife was Hungarian ( the sister of Eugene Paul Wigner ).

At the University of Cambridge ( fencing) and Oxford ( Pentathlon ) Bollobás also emerged sporty.

In 2007 he was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize. He is a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

His doctoral include Keith M. Ball, Imre Leader, Oliver Riordan, Timothy Gowers and Reinhard Diestel.

Writings

• 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 system, hyper graphs, families of vectors, and combinatorial probability. Cambridge University Press 1986.
• Linear Analysis - an introductory course. Cambridge University Press 1990, 1999.
• Alan Baker, András Hajnal (ed.): A tribute to Paul Erdos. Cambridge University Press 1990.
• (Eds.): Probabilistic combinatorics and its applications. American Mathematical Society in 1991.
• With Andrew Thomason (ed.): Combinatorics, Geometry and Probability -a tribute to Paul Erdos. 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 of his wife Gabrielle Bollobás )
• Robert Kozma, Dezso Miklos: Handbook of Large - Scale Random Networks. Springer 2009.