Lajos Takács

Lajos Takács (born August 21, 1924 in Maglód) was a Hungarian mathematician, known for his contributions to probability theory and in particular, queueing theory. He wrote over two hundred scientific papers and two books.

He studied at the Technical University of Budapest (1943), taking courses with Charles Jordan and later receiving a Ph.D. for his dissertation "On a Probability-theoretical investigation of Brownian Motion" (1948). Also, he was awarded a habilitation degree on a treatise entitled "Stochastic processes arising in the theory of particle counters" (1957).

He worked at Tungsram research under Zoltán Bay, studying microwave echoes from the moon (1946-55), as well as being a research assistant at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His work in queueing theory started in traffic analysis with the Telecommunications Research Center (Tungsram). He became one of the firstto introduce semi-Markov processes in queueing theory (1952).Fact|date=June 2008

He took a lecturing appointment at Imperial College in London and London School of Economics (1958), before moving to Columbia University in New York City (1959-66) and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (1966-87), advising over twenty Ph.D.-theses. [ [http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=37339 entry] at mathematics geneaology] He also held visiting appointments at Bell Labs and IBM Research, had sabbaticals at Stanford University (1966).

Publications

The following is a partial list of his several hundred publications

*"Some Investigations Concerning Recurrent Stochastic Processes of a Certain Kind", 1953.
*"Investigations of Waiting Time Problems by Reduction to Markov Processes", 1954
*"Sojourn times for the Brownian motion", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 231–246, 1998
*"In memoriam: Pál Erdős (1913-1996)", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 563–564, 1996
*"Sojourn times", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 415–426, 1996
*"Brownian local times", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 209–232, 1995
*"Limit distributions for queues and random rooted trees", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 189–216, 1993
*"On a probability problem connected with Railway traffic", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1–27, 1991
*"Conditional limit theorems for branching processes", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 263–292, 1991
*"On the distribution of the number of vertices in layers of random trees", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 175–186, 1991
*"Queues, random graphs and branching processes", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 223–243, 1988
*"On the distribution of the supremum for stochastic processes", Annales de l'institut Henri Poincaré (B) Probabilités et Statistiques, 6(3):237-247, 1970
*"On the Total Heights of Random Rooted Binary Trees", J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 61(2): 155-166 (1994)
*"Counting forests", Discrete Mathematics 84(3): 323-326 (1990)
*"On Cayley's formula for counting forests", J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 53(2): 321-323 (1990)
*"A generalization of an inequality of Stepanov", J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 48(2): 289-293 (1990)
*"On the Number of Distinct Forests", SIAM J. Discrete Math. 3(4): 574-581 (1990)
*"On the "problème des ménages", Discrete Mathematics 36(3): 289-297 (1981)
*"On a Combinatorial Theorem Related to a Theorem of G. Szegö", J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 30(3): 345-348 (1981)
*"An Identity for Ordered Partial Sums", J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 23(3): 364-365 (1977)

Books

*"Introduction to the Theory of Queues", (Oxford University Press, 1962)
*"Combinatorial Methods in the Theory of Stochastic Processes", 1967

Awards

*1994 John von Neumann Theory Prize

Literature

*Jewgeni H. Dshalalow1 and Ryszard Syski, "Lajos Takács and his work", in Jnr. of Applied Math. and Stochastic Analysis, 7(3):215-237, 1994. [http://www.hindawi.com/GetPDF.aspx?doi=10.1155/S1048953394000237 online version of festschrift] ]
*"Studies in Applied Probability, Papers in Honour of Lajos Takacs". by J. Galambos, J. Gani, The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 46(11):1397-98, 1995

References