Lajos Pósa (mathematician)

Lajos Pósa (born December 9, 1947 in Budapest) is a Hungarian mathematician working in the topic of combinatorics, and one of the most prominent mathematics educators of Hungary, best known of his mathematics camps for gifted students. Winner of the Széchenyi Prize. Paul Erdős's favorite "child", he discovered theorems at the age of 16. Since 2002 he works at the Rényi Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; earlier he was at the Eötvös Loránd University, at the Departments of Mathematical Analysis, Computer Science.

He was born in Budapest, Hungary on December 9, 1947. His father was a chemist, his mother a mathematics teacher. He was a child prodigy. While still in elementary school, the educator Rózsa Péter, friend of his mother introduced him to Paul Erdős, who invited him for lunch in a restaurant, and bombarded him with mathematical questions. Pósa finished the problems sooner than his soup, which impressed Erdős, who himself had been a child prodigy, and who supported young talents with much care and competence. That is how Pósa’s first paper was born, co-authored with Erdős (hence his Erdős number is 1).

He went to the first special mathematics class of the country at Fazekas Mihály Secondary School from 1962 to 1966, where his classmates included Miklós Laczkovich, László Lovász, József Pelikán, Zsolt Baranyai, István Berkes, Katalin Vesztergombi, Péter Major. He won the first prize on the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1966 (Bulgaria) and second prize in 1965 (Germany).

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