Béla Bollobás

Béla Bollobás FRS (born 3 August 1943) is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős since the age of 14. As a student, he took part in the first three International Mathematical Olympiads, winning two gold medals. Paul Erdős invited Bollobás to lunch after hearing about his victories, and they kept in touch afterward. Bollobás' first publication was a joint publication with Erdős on extremal problems in graph theory, written when he was in high school in 1962. With Erdős's recommendation to Harold Davenport and a long struggle for permission from the Hungarian authorities, Bollobás was able to spend an undergraduate year in Cambridge, England. However, the authorities denied his request to return to Cambridge for doctoral study. A similar scholarship offer from Paris was also quashed. He wrote his first doctorate in discrete geometry under the supervision of László Fejes Tóth and Paul Erdős in Budapest University, 1967, after which he spent a year in Moscow with Israïl Moiseevich Gelfand. After spending a year at Christ Church, Oxford, where Michael Atiyah held the Savilian Chair of Geometry, he vowed never to return to Hungary due to his disillusion with the 1956 Soviet intervention. He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1972 he received a second PhD in functional analysis, studying Banach algebras under the supervision of Frank Adams. Bollobás recalled, "By then, I said to myself, 'If I ever manage to leave Hungary, I won't return.'" In 1970, he was awarded a fellowship to the college. His main area of research is combinatorics, particularly graph theory. His chief interests are in extremal graph theory and random graph theory. In 1996 he resigned his university post, but remained a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.