- József Beck
József Beck (
Budapest ,Hungary ,February 14 ,1952 ) is a professor of mathematics atRutgers University .His contributions to combinatorics include the
partial colouring lemma and theBeck-Fiala theorem in discrepancy theory, the algorithmic version of theLovász local lemma , the two extremities theorem incombinatorial geometry and thesecond moment method in the theory ofpositional game s, among others.Beck was awarded the
Fulkerson Prize in1985 for a paper titled "Roth's estimate of the discrepancy of integer sequences is nearly sharp", which introduced the notion of discrepancy on hypergraphs and established an upper bound on the discrepancy of the family of arithmetic progressions contained in {1,2,...,n}, matching the classical lower bound up to a polylogarithmic factor.Jiří Matoušek andJoel Spencer later succeeded in getting rid of this factor, showing that the bound was really sharp.He is external member of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2004).His books
* Jozsef Beck, William W. L. Chen: "Irregularities of Distribution", Cambridge University Press, 1987.
* J. Beck: "Combinatorial Games: Tic-Tac-Toe Theory", Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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