Imre Izsák

Imre Gyula Izsák (Zalaegerszeg, Hungary, February 21, 1929 – Paris, France, April 21, 1965) was a Hungarian mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and celestial mechanician. His father, Gyula Izsák, taught geography and biology in Zalaegerszeg. His mother, Aranka Pálfi, was a mathematics and physics teacher.

Izsák received his basic schooling in Zalaegerszeg. After his mother's early death, he continued his studies at the Lower Real School in Kőszeg, where he was particularly influenced by his geography and science teacher, Szilárd Zerinváry, who later gained national fame with his writings on astronomy and the stars.

Because of his outstanding mathematical abilities, Izsák was sent on to study at the Artúr Görgey Military Cadet Engineering School in Esztergom. Near the end of the Second World War, his entire class of military cadets was taken to Germany, where he became a prisoner of war.

On his return to his native town from a prisoner-of-war camp in the fall of 1945, he enrolled in the 6th grade of Ferenc Deák High School (now Miklós Zrínyi High School). The following year, he simultaneously completed 7th and 8th grade with outstanding results and ranked 1st and 2nd in national mathematics competitions.

He earned his college degree in mathematics and physics at the Loránd Eötvös University of Arts and Sciences in Budapest. While there, he was a resident of Eötvös College, a residential college for elite students of the university. During his second year he published a paper that resulted in controversy, as some could not believe that such a paper on differential geometry had been written by a young student. Attending lectures by István Földes raised his interest in celestial mechanics. During his college years, he was an assistant at the observatory founded by Miklós Konkoly-Thege. He continued working there after earning his degree in the summer of 1951. In the observatory, he worked under the supervision of László Detre and Júlia Balázs and started working on his advanced degree at the age of 22.

In 1953 he joined the Szabadsághegyi Observatory. He later taught at the University of Arts and Sciences in Szeged.

Izsák was interested in the three-body problem and the n-body problem. He studied the light emissions of quasars. After defending his doctorate and ignoring the prevailing wisdom that celestial mechanics was a resolved field, he returned to his favorite topic and started working on the trajectories of rockets and satellites. Putting his work into practice would have been possible only in the Soviet Union or the USA; international connections in Hungary at that time were limited to the occasional conference in the Soviet Union. Therefore, in November 1956, during the Hungarian revolution, he took advantage of the open borders and emigrated to Austria.

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