Béla Bollobás
| Béla Bollobás | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
3 August 1943 Budapest, Hungary |
| Fields |
Mathematics Random graphs Extremal graph theory |
| Institutions |
University of Cambridge University of Memphis |
| Alma mater |
Eötvös Loránd University Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor |
László Fejes Tóth Paul Erdős Frank Adams |
| Doctoral students | |
| Known for |
Functional analysis combinatorics Extremal graph theory percolation theory graph polynomials Isoperimetric inequality |
| Notable awards |
Senior Whitehead Prize (2007) Fellow of the Royal Society (2011) Doctor of Science |
| Spouse | Gabriella Bollobás |
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Website royalsociety www |
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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 highly influenced by Paul Erdős since he was 14.
As a student, he took part in the first three International Mathematical Olympiads, winning two gold medals. Paul Erdős invited Bollobás to a lunch after hearing about his accomplishment and they kept in touch since then. His first publication was a joint publication with Erdős on extremal problems in graph theory that was written when he was in high school in 1962.
With Erdős’s recommendation to Harold Davenport and Bollobás’s long campaigning to get permission from the Communist authorities, Bollobás was able to spend a year in Cambridge, England, during his undergraduate studies. However, his return to Cambridge again to complete his Ph.D. upon an offer from the university was denied by the Communist authorities. A following scholarship offer from Paris was also rejected by the authorities. 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, and vowing never to return to Hungary due to his disillusion with the 1956 Soviet intervention and subsequent puppet communist regime, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1972 he received a second Ph.D. in functional analysis (on Banach algebras) under the supervision of Frank Adams. In 1970, he was awarded a fellowship to the college.
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