Laszlo Lovasz

Between 1971 and 1975 he was a senior research fellow at the Department of Geometry at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). Between 1975 and 1978 he was an associate professor at József Attila University (JATE), and from 1978 he was the head of the Department of Geometry. In 1982 he returned to ELTE, where he has been the head of the Department of Computer Science since 1983. Between 1993 and 1999 he was a professor at the Department of Computer Science at Yale University.

From 1999 to 2006, he was a research scientist at Microsoft Research.

From 2006 to 2011, he was the head of the Institute of Mathematics at ELTE, and then a professor from 2011.

Visiting professor at several universities: Princeton University from 1987, Vanderbilt University from 1972-1973, and Bonn University from 1984-1985.
Honorary doctorates: University of Waterloo, Canada (1992); University of Szeged (1999); Budapest University of Technology (BME, 2002); University of Calgary, Canada (2006); Tel Aviv University (2018); Charles University, Prague (2020).

He defended his candidate's thesis in 1970 and his academic doctorate in 1977. After that, he was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Mathematical and Operations Research Committee. In 1979, he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1985 a full member, and in 2008 a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' presidency. Between 1987 and 1994, he was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), then its president between 2007-2010. In the meantime, between 2004-2006, he was a member of the five-member jury of the Abel Prize.

He was the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.

Foreign academic memberships: European Academy of Sciences and Arts (Paris, 1981); Academia Europaea (1991); US National Academy of Sciences (2012); Rhineland-Westphalian Academy of Sciences (1993); German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina (2002); Russian Academy of Sciences (2006); Royal Netherlands Academy (2006); Royal Swedish Academy (2007).

In 1981, together with Pál Erdős and László Babai, he founded the journal Combinatorica, and in 1985 he was one of the founders of the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics institution, which provides basic mathematics education in Hungary for American students.

He is primarily interested in combinatorics and computer science. He is known for developing the Lovász local lemma, the Lovász basis reduction algorithm (the Lenstra–Lenstra–Lovász (LLL) algorithm), and the algorithmic theory of convex bodies and lattices. Since the early 2000s, he has taken a leading role in the development of graph boundary theory. Since 2018, he has been the coordinator of a 6-year international project working on the mathematical description of the characteristics of dynamically changing networks.
He is the author or co-author of more than two hundred and fifty scientific publications and nine books.

Kitüntetései: Grünwald Géza-díj (Bolyai János Matematika Társulat, BJMT, 1970); Pólya Prize (SIAM, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1979); Best Information Theory Paper Award (IEEE, 1981); Fulkerson Prize (AMS, MPS, 1982, 2012); Állami Díj (1985); Szele Tibor emlékérem (BJMT, 1991); Brouwer Medal (Dutch Matematical Society, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, 1993); A Magyar Érdemrend Középkeresztje (1998); Bolzano Medal (Czech Mathematical Society, 1998); Wolf Prize (Wolf Foundation, 1999); Knuth Prize (ACM-SIGACT, 1999); Magyar Corvin-lánc (2001); Gődel Prize (EATCS and ACM SIGART, 2001); John von Neumann Medal (IEEE, 2001); Neumann János emlékplakett (NJSZT, 2003); John von Neumann Theory Prize (INFORMS, 2005); Bolyai János alkotói díj (2007); Széchenyi-nagydíj (2008); Bolyai-nagydíj (ELTE, 2008); Kyoto Prize (Inamori Foundation, 2010); Neumann János professzori cím (BME, NJSZT, 2017); Hypatia Prize (Barcelona City Council, Academia Europaea, 2019); Hazám Díj (XXI. Század Társaság, 2020); Szent István Rend (legmagasabb állami kitüntetés, 2021).