Béla Bollobás

Béla Bollobás
Béla Bollobás
Born	August 3, 1943 (age 80); Budapest, Hungary
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Known for	Functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory
Awards	Senior Whitehead Prize (2007)
	Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Memphis
Notable students	Tim Gowers; Imre Leader; Charles Read; Jonathan Partington; Ago-Erik Riet

Béla Bollobás (born August 3, 1943 in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics and graph theory. His first doctorate was for work in discrete geometry in 1967, after which he spent a year in Moscow with Gelfand. After spending a year in Oxford he went to Cambridge, where in 1972 he received a Ph.D. in functional analysis.^[1]

He is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1970, and is currently the Jabie Hardin Chair Professor at the University of Memphis.

He is known as an important expositor of combinatorial mathematics, on which he has written a number of books, and for spreading the combinatorial approach. His students include Tim Gowers, Fields Medal winner, and current Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge; Imre Leader, also professor of mathematics at Cambridge; Charles Read and Jonathan Partington, both Professors of Mathematics at the University of Leeds. He co-wrote 18 papers with Paul Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1.^[2]

He proved several results on random graphs, e.g., that the chromatic number of the random graph on n vertices is asymptotically $n/2\log n$ . Also, he established a large number of theorems on extremal problems of set systems, as an example, he proved first what became later known as the LYM inequality.