|known_for = Functional analysis<br />combinatorics<br />Extremal graph theory<br />percolation theory<br /> graph polynomials

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|awards = Senior Whitehead Prize (2007) <br /> Bocskai Prize (2015) <br /> Széchenyi Prize (2017)

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| spouse = Gabriella Bollobás He is currently a professor and chair of excellence at the University of Memphis.

Early life and education

While still at high school in Hungary, Bollobás took part in the first three International Mathematical Olympiads, in 1959, 1960, and 1961, winning two gold medals. Paul Erdős invited Bollobás to lunch after hearing about his victories, and they kept in touch. Bollobás's first publication was a joint paper with Erdős, on extremal problems in graph theory, written in 1962 while he was still in high school.

Bollobás became a student of mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University, and with Erdős's recommendation to Harold Davenport (and a long struggle for permission with the Hungarian authorities) was able to spend an undergraduate year at the University of Cambridge, in England. However, the authorities denied his request to return to Cambridge for doctoral study. A similar scholarship offer from Paris was also quashed. He wrote his first doctorate in discrete geometry under the supervision of László Fejes Tóth and Paul Erdős in Budapest University, 1967, after which he spent a year in Moscow with Israïl Moiseevich Gelfand. After spending a year at Christ Church, Oxford, where Michael Atiyah held the Savilian Chair of Geometry, he vowed never to return to Hungary due to his disillusion with the 1956 Soviet intervention. He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1972 he received a second PhD in functional analysis, studying Banach algebras under the supervision of Frank Adams.

His main area of research is combinatorics, particularly graph theory. His chief interests are in extremal graph theory and random graph theory. In 1996 he resigned his university post, but remained a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Career

Bollobás 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.

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. 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 recognises 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. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Awards and honours

Bollobás was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011. His nomination reads

In 1998 he was an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He was elected Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2013, a Member of the Academy of Europea in 2017 and a member of Academia Brasileira Ciencias (ABC) in 2023. He received an honorary doctorate from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań in 2013. In 2016 he received the Bocskai Prize, the Széchenyi Prize in 2017 and the 2023 Friend of Hungary Prize.

Personal life

His father was a physician. His wife, Gabriella Bollobás, born in Budapest, was an actress and a musician in Hungary before moving to England to become a sculptor. She made busts of mathematicians and scientists, including Paul Erdős, Bill Tutte, George Batchelor, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, and Stephen Hawking, as well as a cast bronze of David Hilbert.

Selected works

  • Extremal Graph Theory. Academic Press 1978, Dover 2004 (see here).
  • Graph theory- an introductory course. Springer 1979,, .
  • Random Graphs. Academic Press 1985. Cambridge University Press 2001 , .
  • Combinatorics - set systems, hypergraphs, families of vectors, and combinatorial probability. Cambridge University Press 1986 .
  • Linear Analysis – an introductory course. Cambridge University Press 1990, 1999 ,.
  • with Alan Baker, András Hajnal (ed.): A tribute to Paul Erdös. Cambridge University Press 1990 ,.
  • (ed.): Probabilistic combinatorics and its applications. American Mathematical Society 1991 .
  • with Andrew Thomason (ed.): Combinatorics, Geometry and Probability- a tribute to Paul Erdös. Cambridge University Press 1997 , .
  • Modern Graph Theory. Springer 1998, , .
  • (ed.): Contemporary Combinatorics. Springer und Janos Bolyai Mathematical Society, Budapest 2002 .
  • with Oliver Riordan: Percolation. Cambridge University Press 2006 , .
  • The Art of Mathematics – Coffee Time in Memphis. Cambridge University Press 2006 , (with drawings by his wife Gabrielle Bollobás)
  • with Robert Kozma, Dezső Miklós: Handbook of Large-Scale Random Networks. Springer 2009, , .

References

  • Interview in the magazine Imprints, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore
  • Béla Bollobás on Budapest protest, January 2012