Miklós Simonovits (4 September 1943 in Budapest) is a
Hungarian mathematician who currently works at the
Rényi Institute of Mathematics in
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 ...
and is a member of 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 ...
. He is on the advisory board of the journal ''
Combinatorica
''Combinatorica'' is an international journal of mathematics, publishing papers in the fields of combinatorics and computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theore ...
''. He is best known for his work in
extremal graph theory
Extremal graph theory is a branch of combinatorics, itself an area of mathematics, that lies at the intersection of extremal combinatorics and graph theory. In essence, extremal graph theory studies how global properties of a graph influence loca ...
and was awarded
Széchenyi Prize
The Széchenyi Prize (), named after István Széchenyi, is a prize given in Hungary by the state, replacing the former State Prize in 1990 in recognition of those who have made an outstanding contribution to academic life in Hungary.
Recipients ...
in 2014. Among other things, he discovered the method of progressive induction which he used to describe graphs which do not contain a predetermined graph and the number of edges is close to maximal. With
Lovász, he gave a
randomized algorithm
A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performan ...
using ''O''(''n''
7 log
2 ''n'')
separation calls to approximate the volume of a convex body within a fixed relative error.
Simonovits was also one of the most frequent collaborators with
Paul Erdős
Paul Erdős ( ; 26March 191320September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, g ...
, co-authoring 21 papers with him.
Career
He began his university studies at the Mathematics department of
Eötvös Loránd University
Eötvös Loránd University (, ELTE, also known as ''University of Budapest'') is a Hungarian public research university based in Budapest. Founded in 1635, ELTE is one of the largest and most prestigious public higher education institutions in ...
in 1962, after winning
silver and bronze medalat the International Mathematics Olympiad in 1961 and 1962 respectively. He got his diploma in mathematics from the university in 1967 and defended his PhD under
Vera T. Sós in 1971. He taught as an assistant professor and then associate professor at Eötvös Loránd, from 1971 to 1979, mainly combinatorics and analysis. He joined Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics in 1979. In the coming years, he was appointed as the professor in Discrete mathematics. He was also a visiting professor at a number of foreign institutions in US and Canada. He was also a visiting researcher at
Moscow State University
Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public university, public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, a ...
,
Charles University
Charles University (CUNI; , UK; ; ), or historically as the University of Prague (), is the largest university in the Czech Republic. It is one of the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, oldest universities in the world in conti ...
, Prague, Warsaw University, Denmark and various institutions in India. He was elected as a corresponding member at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2001 and full membership was awarded in 2008.
Academic work
His main research interests are Combinatorics, Extremal Graph Theory, Theoretical Computer Science and Random Graphs.
He discovered the method of progressive induction which he used to describe graphs which do not contain a predetermined graph and the number of edges is close to maximal. With
Laszlo Lovász, he gave a
randomized algorithm
A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performan ...
using ''O''(''n''
7 log
2 ''n'')
separation calls to approximate the volume of a convex body within a fixed relative error.
He is a long-time collaborator of
Endre Szemeredi and worked with him closely.
Simonovits was also one of the most frequent collaborators with
Paul Erdős
Paul Erdős ( ; 26March 191320September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, g ...
, co-authoring 21 papers with him.
Family
His father Simonovits István (1907–1985) was a doctor and a hematologist. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Beke Anna, his mother, was a mathematics and physics teacher, who also worked in a book publishing company.
Awards
*
Tibor Szele-Medal (1989)
*
Academy Award
The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence ...
(1993)
*
Széchenyi-Prize (2014)
Key publications
* ''A limit theorem in graph theory'' (with Erdős Pál, 1966)
* ''Anti-Ramsey theorems'' (coauthor, 1973)
* ''On the Structure of Edge Graphs-2'' (coauthor, 1976)
* ''Spanning Retracts of a Partially Ordered Set'' (coauthor, 1980)
* ''Compactness Results in Extremal Graph-Theory'' (with Erdős Pál, 1982)
* ''Supersaturated Graphs and Hypergraphs'' (with Erdős Pál, 1983)
* ''On Restricted Colorings of K_n'' (
with T. Sós Vera, 1984)
* ''Szemerédi Partition And Quasi-Randomness'' (with T. Sós Vera, 1991)
* ''Random Walks in a Convex Body and an Improved Volume Algorithm'' (
with Lovász László, 1993)
* ''Isoperimetric Problems for Convex Bodies and a Localization Lemma'' (coauthor, 1995)
* ''Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma and its Applications in Graph Theory'' (with Komlós János, 1996)
* ''The Regularity Lemma and its applications in graph theory'' (coauthor, 2002)
* ''Determinisztikus és véletlen struktúrák az extrém gráfelméletben'' (Deterministic and random structures in extreme graph-theory) (2002)
* ''Triple Systems not Containing a Fano Configuration'' (
with Füredi Zoltán, 2005)
* ''Stabilitási módszerek alkalmazása a gráfelméletben'' (Application of stability methods in graph-theory) (2008)
References
External links
Miklós Simonovits' home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Simonovits, Miklos
Living people
Combinatorialists
Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
20th-century Hungarian mathematicians
21st-century Hungarian mathematicians
1943 births