Concept
László Lovász (ˈlovaːs ˈlaːsloː ; born March 9, 1948) is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020. In graph theory, Lovász's notable contributions include the proofs of Kneser's conjecture and the Lovász local lemma, as well as the formulation of the Erdős–Faber–Lovász conjecture. He is also one of the eponymous authors of the LLL lattice reduction algorithm. Lovász was born on March 9, 1948, in Budapest, Hungary. Lovász attended the Fazekas Mihály Gimnázium in Budapest. He won three gold medals (1964–1966) and one silver medal (1963) at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He also participated in a Hungarian game show about math prodigies. Paul Erdős helped introduce Lovász to graph theory at a young age. Lovász received his Candidate of Sciences (C.Sc.) degree in 1970 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His advisor was Tibor Gallai. He received his first doctorate (Dr.Rer.Nat.) degree from Eötvös Loránd University in 1971 and his second doctorate (Dr.Math.Sci.) from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1977. From 1971 to 1975, Lovász worked at Eötvös Loránd University as a research associate. From 1975 to 1978, he was a docent at the University of Szeged, and then served as a professor and the Chair of Geometry there until 1982. He then returned to Eötvös Loránd University as a professor and the Chair of Computer Science until 1993. Lovász was a professor at Yale University from 1993 to 1999, when he moved to the Microsoft Research Center where he worked as a senior researcher until 2006. He returned to Eötvös Loránd University where he was the director of the Mathematical Institute (2006–2011) and a professor in the Department of Computer Science (2006–2018). He retired in 2018.
