| Béla Bollobás | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 3, 1943 Budapest, Hungary |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge, University of Memphis |
| Alma mater | Eötvös Loránd University, University of Cambridge |
| Notable students | Keith Ball József Balogh Graham Brightwell Keith Carne Tristan Denley Reinhard Diestel Timothy Gowers Penelope Haxell Yoshiharu Kohayakawa Imre Leader Sebastian Koch Robert Morris Jonathan Partington Luke Pebody Jamie Radcliffe Charles Read Oliver Riordan Alexander Scott Alan Stacey Andrew Thomason Jerzy Wojciechowski |
| Known for |
Functional analysis, combinatorics, graph polynomials |
| Notable awards |
Senior Whitehead Prize (2007), |
Béla Bollobás FRS (born August 3, 1943 in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory and percolation. As a student, he took part in the first three International Mathematical Olympiads, winning two gold medals.[1] He wrote his first doctorate in discrete geometry under the supervision of László Fejes Tóth and Paul Erdős in 1967, after which he spent a year in Moscow with Israïl Moiseevich Gelfand. After spending a year in Oxford (Christ Church), and vowing never to return to Hungary due to his disillusion with the 1956 Soviet intervention and subsequent puppet communist regime, he went to Oxford, where in 1972 he received a Ph.D. in functional analysis under the supervision of Frank Adams.[2]
He has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1970; in 1996 he was appointed to the Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis, and in 2005 he was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship at Trinity College.
He has proved numerous important results on extremal graph theory, functional analysis, the theory of random graphs, graph polynomials and percolation. For example, with Paul Erdős he proved sharp results about the structure of dense graphs; he was the first to prove detailed results about the phase transition in the evolution of random graphs; he proved that the chromatic number of the random graph on n vertices is asymptotically n/2 log n; with Imre Leader he proved basic discrete isoperimetric inequalities; with Richard Arratia and Gregory Sorkin he constructed the interlace polynomial; with Oliver Riordan he introduced the ribbon polynomial (now called the Bollobás–Riordan polynomial); with Andrew Thomason, József Balogh, Miklós Simonovits, Robert Morris and Noga Alon he studied monotone and hereditary graph properties; with József Balogh, Hugo Duminil-Copin and Robert Morris he studied bootstrap percolation; with Oliver Riordan he proved that the critical probability in random Voronoi percolation in the plane is 1/2; and with Svante Janson and Oliver Riordan he introduced a very general model of heterogeneous sparse random graphs.
In addition to over 350 research papers on mathematics, he has written several books, including the research monographs "Extremal Graph Theory", "Random Graphs" and "Percolation" (with Oliver Riordan), the introductory books "Modern Graph Theory", "Combinatorics" and "Linear Analysis", and the collection of problems "The Art of Mathematics – Coffee Time in Memphis", with drawings by Gabriella Bollobás. He has also edited a number of books, including "Littlewood's Miscellany".
Béla Bollobás has had a great many research students, including Andrew Thomason, Keith Carne, Timothy Gowers (who was awarded a Fields Medal in 1998) and Imre Leader at the University of Cambridge, Alexander Scott and Oliver Riordan now at Oxford, Jonathan Partington and Charles Read now at Leeds and Keith Ball and Graham Brightwell now in London at the LSE.
Béla Bollobás is an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; in 2007 he was awarded the Senior Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society.[3] In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his major contributions to many different areas of mathematics within the broad field of combinatorics, including random graphs, percolation, extremal graphs, set systems and isoperimetric inequalities. The citation also recognizes the profound influence of his textbooks in many of these areas, and his key role in establishing Britain as one of the leading countries in probabilistic and extremal combinatorics.[4]
He is also a sportsman, having represented Oxford University at modern pentathlon, and Cambridge University at fencing. His wife, Gabriella Bollobás is an accomplished sculptor and painter.