Katona, Gyula

mathematician

Born in Budapest in 1941. He lost his parents during the urban fighting in Budapest in 1945 and was brought up by his aunt and grandmother. In 1958 he came in first in the Students' National Science Championship, and in 1959 he was one of the members of the Hungarian team at the first National Mathematics Olympics. He obtained his degree in mathematics from ELTE in 1964. He has worked at KFKI, the Central Physics Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (currently the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics) since 1966. He held the position of director there between 1996-2005. His main research fields include that of combinatorics and its applications (probability theory, database theory and cryptography). He is the author of around 110 publications. He has been teaching at ELTE since 1964. In 1995 he was elected a Corresponding Member, and in 2001 a Regular Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has spent a total of 12 semesters at 8 universities - in Göttingen, Moscow and the United States - as a guest lecturer. He is on the editorial boards of 14 principally international journals. Some of his most famed disciples include Zoltán Füredi, a corresponding member of HAS, and Péter Frankl (a resident of Japan), who is an external member of HAS. His sons, Gyula and Zsolt, are also mathematicians.

How combinatoric analysis has become known as "Hungarian mathematics"?