Béla Bollobás

Professor Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. Paul Erdős has been his academic influence and inspiration ever since he was 14.

Professor Bollobás is the Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence in Combinatorics at the University of Memphis, and a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Professor Bollobás is one of the world's leading mathematicians in combinatorics. He has a huge published output, which includes major contributions to many different branches of this very large area, such as random graphs, percolation, extremal graphs and set systems, isoperimetric inequalities. His main area of research is combinatorics, particularly in graph theory. The two areas that interest him most are extremal graph theory and random graph theory.

In addition to over 350 research papers on mathematics, he has written several books. He has two PhDs, the first on discrete geometry under the supervision of László Fejes Tóth and Paul Erdős in Budapest University, the second in functional analysis under the supervision of Frank Adams in Trinity College, Cambridge.

Professor 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, and 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