New president at the Academy of Sciences

Internationally acclaimed mathematician and computer scientist László Lovász has been elected as the new president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) at a closed session of the academy’s 185th annual assembly meeting in Budapest this Tuesday. His predecessor, József Pálinkás had served as MTA President since 2008.

Born in Budapest in 1948, László Lovász already excelled in mathematics in secondary school, winning gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (1964, 1965 and – with two special prizes – in 1966). He became a member of MTA at the early age of 31. His achievements are highly recognized worldwide as he has achieved outstanding results in various fields of number theory such as discrete mathematics, combinatorial optimization and algorithm theory.

According to MTA’s web page, László Lovász has unquestionable merits in taking combinatorics, a traditional focal point of Hungarian mathematics, into the forefront of modern mathematics. Among the numerous international awards and recognitions Lovász has received throughout his career, the most prestigious is the Kyoto-prize of 2010, considered as the Japanese Nobel-prize for mathematics by many. In Hungary, he was awarded with the Széchenyi Grand Prize in 2008 and the Bolyai-prize in 2007. Professor Lovász is also the proud owner of the highly acclaimed Wolf-prize (1999).

He was elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2007), honorary member of the London Mathematical Society (2009) as was elected to the American National Academy of Sciences (2011). In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He was also President of the International Mathematical Union (2007-2010).

László Lovász was elected as MTA President for three years as were the vice presidents (neurobiologist Tamás Freund, law professor Lajos Vékás and mathematician Domokos Szász) and the general secretary Ádám Török, an economist.