László Babai

László Babai (called Laci by friends and colleagues), born July 20 1950 in Budapest, is a Hungarian professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on computational complexity theory, algorithms, combinatorics, and finite groups, with an emphasis on the interactions between these fields. He is the author of over 150 academic papers.

His notable accomplishments include the introduction of interactive proof systems (see [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=49987&dl=ACM&coll=portal] ), the introduction of the term Las Vegas algorithm, and the introduction of group theoretic methods in graph isomorphism testing (see [http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci/lasvegas79.pdf] for the latter two).

He received his doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1975. [MathGenealogy|id=78102]

He is editor-in-chief of the refereed online journal [http://theoryofcomputing.org/ Theory of Computing] .

Babai was also involved in the creation of the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program and first coined the name.

His Erdős number is one.

Honors

*Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science (1993)
* [http://www-news.uchicago.edu/resources/quantrell/ Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching] (June 2005).

Quotations

*"What we need is not more theorems, but more proofs."
*"The only math I never used is math I never learned."

References

External links

* [http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci Personal website] .
* [http://ams.org/mathscinet/search/publications.html?extend=1&pg1=IID&r=1&s1=28760 MathSciNet: "Items authored by Babai, László."]
* [http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/indices/a-tree/b/Babai:L=aacute=szl=oacute=.html DBLP: László Babai] .
*MathGenealogy|id=78102.
* [http://sigact.acm.org/cgi-bin/genealogy.cgi?file=database-B.html&from=Babai,Laszlo Theoretical Computer Science Genealogy entry] .