Gábor Tardos (born 11 July 1964) is a Hungarian mathematician, currently a professor at

Central European University Central European University (CEU; , ) is a private research university in Vienna. The university offers graduate and undergraduate programs in the social sciences and humanities, which are accredited in Austria and the United States. The univ ...

and previously a

Canada Research Chair Canada Research Chair (CRC) is a title given to certain Canadian university research professors by the Canada Research Chairs Program. Program goals The Canada Research Chair program was established in 2000 as a part of the Government of Canada ...

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a Public university, public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It maintains three campuses in Greater Vancouver, respectively located in Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, British Columbia, Surrey, and ...

. He works mainly in

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

. He is the younger brother of

Éva Tardos Éva Tardos (born 1 October 1957) is a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Tardos's research interest is algorithms. Her work focuses on the design and analysis of efficient ...

Education and career

Gábor Tardos received his PhD in Mathematics from Eötvös University,

Budapest Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...

in 1988. His counsellors were

László Babai László "Laci" Babai (born July 20, 1950, in Budapest) a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and won the Knuth Prize. Babai was an invited speaker at the International Congresses of Mathematicians in Kyoto (1990), Zürich (199 ...

and Péter Pálfy. He held postdoctoral posts at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

and the

Princeton Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the Unit ...

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

. From 2005 to 2013, he served as a

of discrete and computational geometry at

. He then returned to Budapest to the

Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics The Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics () is the research institute in mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was created in 1950 by Alfréd Rényi, who directed it until his death. Since its creation, the institute has been th ...

where he has served as a research fellow since 1991.

Mathematical results

Tardos started with a result in

universal algebra Universal algebra (sometimes called general algebra) is the field of mathematics that studies algebraic structures in general, not specific types of algebraic structures. For instance, rather than considering groups or rings as the object of stud ...

: he exhibited a maximal clone of order-preserving operations that is not finitely generated. He obtained partial results concerning the

Hanna Neumann conjecture In the mathematical subject of group theory, the Hanna Neumann conjecture is a statement about the rank of the intersection of two finitely generated subgroups of a free group. The conjecture was posed by Hanna Neumann in 1957. In 2011, a strength ...

. With his student, Adam Marcus, he proved a combinatorial conjecture of

Zoltán Füredi Zoltán Füredi (Budapest, Hungary, 21 May 1954) is a Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics, mainly in discrete geometry and extremal combinatorics. He was a student of Gyula O. H. Katona. He is a corresponding member of the Hungari ...

and Péter Hajnal that was known to imply the

Stanley–Wilf conjecture The Stanley–Wilf conjecture, formulated independently by Richard P. Stanley and Herbert Wilf in the late 1980s, states that the growth rate of every proper permutation class is Exponential growth, singly exponential. It was proved by and is no l ...

. With topological methods he proved that if

\mathcal

is a finite set system consisting of the unions of intervals on two disjoint lines, then

\tau(\mathcal)\leq 2\nu(\mathcal)

holds, where

\tau(\mathcal)

is the least number of points covering all elements of

\mathcal

and

\nu(\mathcal)

is the size of the largest disjoint subsystem of

\mathcal

. Tardos worked out a method for optimal probabilistic fingerprint codes. Although the mathematical content is hard, the algorithm is easy to implement.

Awards

He received the

European Mathematical Society The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The curren ...

prize for young researchers at the

European Congress of Mathematics The European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) is the second largest international conference of the mathematics community, after the International Congresses of Mathematicians (ICM). The ECM are held every four years and are timed precisely betwee ...

in 1992 and the Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for Young Researchers. In 1999 he received the

Erdős Prize The Anna and Lajos Erdős Prize in Mathematics is a prize given by the Israel Mathematical Union to an Israeli mathematician (in any field of mathematics and computer science), "with preference to candidates up to the age of 40." The prize was e ...

from the

Hungarian Academy of Sciences The Hungarian Academy of Sciences ( , MTA) is Hungary’s foremost and most prestigious learned society. Its headquarters are located along the banks of the Danube in Budapest, between Széchenyi rakpart and Akadémia utca. The Academy's primar ...

and the

Alfréd Rényi Prize The Alfréd Rényi Prize is awarded biennially by the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Science in honor of founder Alfréd Rényi. By the current rules it is given to one or two fellows of the Institute in recog ...

of the

. He received a Lendület Grant from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2009) specifically devised to keep outstanding researchers in Hungary. In 2020, he received the

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inter ...

for the algorithmic version of the

Lovász local lemma In probability theory, if a large number of events are all independent of one another and each has probability less than 1, then there is a positive (possibly small) probability that none of the events will occur. The Lovász local lemma allows a s ...

that he developed together with Robin Moser. In 2018, Tardos was an invited speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

in Rio de Janeiro.

Selected publications

*. *. *. *.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Tardos, Gabor 1964 births Living people Hungarian computer scientists Combinatorialists 20th-century Hungarian mathematicians 21st-century Hungarian mathematicians Hungarian Jews Academic staff of Simon Fraser University Canada Research Chairs International Mathematical Olympiad participants