Endre Szemerédi

Endre Szemerédi
Endre Szemerédi
Born	(1940-08-21) August 21, 1940 Budapest, Hungary
Nationality	Hungarian
Alma mater	Moscow State University
Awards	Abel Prize (2012) Pólya Prize (1975) Rolf Schock Prizes (2008) Leroy P. Steele Prize (2008) Alfréd Rényi Prize (1973) Member NAS
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Rutgers University
Doctoral advisor	Israil Moiseivich Gelfand
Doctoral students	Jaikumar Radhakrishnan Ali Shokoufandeh Ryan Martin Sachin Lodha Gabor Sarkozy Bela Csaba Ayman Khalfallah Sarmad Abbasi

Endre Szemerédi (pronounced [ˈɛndrɛ ˈsɛmɛreːdi]; born August 21, 1940) is a Hungarian mathematician, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He has been the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986. He has held visiting positions at Stanford University (1974), McGill University (1980), the University of South Carolina (1981–1983) and the University of Chicago (1985–1986). He was born in Budapest, studied in Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and received his PhD from Moscow State University. His adviser was the late mathematician Israel Gelfand.

Work

Endre Szemerédi has published over 200 scientific articles in the fields of discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science, arithmetic combinatorics and discrete geometry. He is best known for his proof from 1975 of an old conjecture of Paul Erdős and Paul Turán: if a sequence of natural numbers has positive upper density then it contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. This is now known as Szemerédi's theorem. One of the key tools introduced in his proof is now known as the Szemerédi regularity lemma, which has become a very important tool in combinatorics, being used for instance in property testing for graphs and in the theory of graph limits.

He is also known for the Szemerédi-Trotter theorem in incidence geometry and the Hajnal-Szemerédi theorem in graph theory. Ajtai and Szemerédi proved the corners theorem, an important step toward higher dimensional generalizations of the Szemerédi theorem. With Ajtai and Komlós he proved the ct²/log t upper bound for the Ramsey number R(3,t), and constructed a sorting network of optimal depth. With Ajtai, Chvátal, and M. M. Newborn, Szemerédi proved the famous Crossing Lemma, that a graph with n vertices and m edges, where m > 4n has at least m³ / 64n² crossings. With Paul Erdős, he proved the Erdős-Szemerédi theorem on the number of sums and products in a finite set. With Wolfgang Paul, Nick Pippenger, and William Trotter, he established a separation between nondeterministic linear time and deterministic linear time, in the spirit of the infamous P versus NP problem. With William Trotter, he established the Szemerédi–Trotter theorem obtaining an optimal bound on the number of incidences between finite collections of points and lines in the plane.

Awards and honors

Szemeredi has won numerous awards and honors for his contribution to mathematics and computer science. A few of them are listed here:

• Grünwald Prize (1967)
• Grünwald Prize (1968)
• Rényi Prize (1973)
• Pólya Prize for Achievement in Applied Mathematics (SIAM) (1975)
• Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1979)
• State of New Jersey Professorship (1986)
• The AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research, (2008)
• The Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics for deep and pioneering work from 1975 on arithmetic progressions in subsets of the integers, (2008)
• The Abel Prize for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science (2012)

Endre Szemeredi is a corresponding member (1982), and member (1987) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a member (2010) of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton University and a permanent research fellow at the Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Budapest.

He was the Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at CALTECH in 1987–88.

Prof. Szemeredi is an honorary doctor of the Charles University, Prague.

He was the lecturer in the Forty-Seventh Annual DeLong Lecture Series at University of Colorado.

He is also a recipient of the Aisenstadt Chair at CRM, University of Montreal. In 2008 he was the Eisenbud Professor at MSRI Berkeley.

In 2012, Szemeredi was awarded the Abel prize “for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, and in recognition of the profound and lasting impact of these contributions on additive number theory and ergodic theory” The Abel prize citation also credited Szemerédi with bringing combinatorics to the centre-stage of mathematics and noted his place in the tradition of Hungarian mathematicians such as George Pólya who emphasized problem-solving approach to mathematics. Szemerédi reacted to the announcement by saying that "It is not my own personal achievement, but recognition for this field of mathematics and Hungarian mathematicians," that gave him the most pleasure.

70th Birthday Conference

An Irregular Mind (Book Cover)

On August 2–7, 2010, the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics and the János Bolyai Mathematical Society organized a conference in honor of the 70th birthday of Endre Szemeredi.

Prior to the conference a volume of the Bolyai Society Mathematical Studies Series, An Irregular Mind, a collection of papers edited by Imre Bárány and József Solymosi, was published to celebrate Szemerédi's achievements on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

External links

• Personal Homepage at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics