György Révész

He began his career as a scientific intern at ELTE. From 1960 he worked in the M-3 computer programming group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Computer Science Center (MTA SZK), where he initiated the creation of compilers. As a graduate student of László Kalmár, he obtained his PhD in 1968; his dissertation was entitled: "On a universal interpretive program".

He worked as the head of the programming group of the Hungarian National Bank (MNB). From 1971, as the head of the Information Processing Laboratory (Infelor), he managed the development of the Mini-COBOL compiler for the EMG 830 computer. After that, he received a managerial assignment at the Computer Coordination Institute (SZKI): he coordinated the development of the R10 software and was a Hungarian member of the ESZR software expert council.

In 1961, his translation of "Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60" was published, in which he introduced several new technical terms into the Hungarian language. In 1977, his book "Introduction to the Theory of Formal Languages" was published, which was a defining basic work in Hungarian university education for 10 years; its English-language version was also used at many foreign universities.

He finally finished his domestic professional career, which lasted until 1980, as a senior research fellow and deputy head of department at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Computer Science and Automation Research Institute (SZTAKI). It was here that he began to work on lambda calculus.

He lived in the United States from 1981 to 2018. He taught at various universities and worked as a researcher at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where he worked on lambda calculus: he transformed the axioms of Church's calculus, developed in the 1930s, and extended it with two new axioms, making it suitable for modeling functional languages. (This result is still cited by many people today.) Finally, he was the head of the department and then a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; he taught as a professor emeritus for another 10 years.