Gyula Tarnay

His mathematical talent became apparent at the Cistercian Gymnasium in Budapest. In 1948, he was a successful competitor in the Secondary School Mathematics Papers. He graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) with a degree in applied mathematics.
He began working at the Institute of Mathematical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where his area of expertise was numerical mathematics and its applications. In 1956, as a result of joint work with András Békéssy, he developed a table for the exponential integral function. He published several papers on numerical topics. Around 1962, the Institute received an analog Integrator, through which he became acquainted with computer technology.
Between 1862 and 1964, he performed calculations and wrote programs as an external researcher at the Computer Center of the Institute of Industrial Economics and Plant Management of the Ministry of Heavy Industry (NIM IGÜSzI). During this time, he and Károllyal Tóth created nomograms for the characteristic equations of non-permanent free surface water motion.

He continued his computer science work at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Computer Science and Automation Research Institute (SZTAKI). In 1966, together with Vilmos Foltényi, he prepared a detailed description of the URAL-2 EFT Autocode. In 1970, at the suggestion of Péter Csáki, he wrote a program for the transformations of random variables with mutual linear regression, which ran on the ICT machine of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Central Physical Research Institute (KFKI), but was later rewritten for the CDC 3300.
For many years, he was a second-year employee at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of ELTE, where he taught numerical methods and computer science. His name can still be found among the lecturers in 2002.