Béla Bollobás
Born	(1943-08-03)3 August 1943 (age 82)[4] Budapest, Hungary
Alma mater	Eötvös Loránd University Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	Functional analysis combinatorics Extremal graph theory percolation theory graph polynomials
Spouse	Gabriella Bollobás[5]
Awards	Senior Whitehead Prize (2007) Bocskai Prize (2015) Széchenyi Prize (2017)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics Random graphs Extremal graph theory
Institutions	Eötvös Loránd University University of Cambridge University of Memphis
Doctoral advisor	László Fejes Tóth Paul Erdős[1] Frank Adams[2]
Doctoral students	Keith Ball[3] József Balogh Graham Brightwell Reinhard Diestel Timothy Gowers Penny Haxell Yoshiharu Kohayakawa Imre Leader Robert Morris Jonathan Partington Charles Read
Website	royalsociety.org/people/bela-bollobas dpmms.cam.ac.uk/person/bb12/

Béla BollobásFRS (born 3 August 1943) is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas ofmathematics, includingfunctional analysis,combinatorics,graph theory, andpercolation theory. He was strongly influenced byPaul Erdős from the age of 14.^[5][6][7][8] He is currently a professor and chair of excellence at theUniversity of Memphis.

While still at high school in Hungary, Bollobás took part in the first threeInternational Mathematical Olympiads, in 1959, 1960, and 1961, winning two gold medals.^[9] Paul Erdős invited Bollobás to lunch after hearing about his victories, and they kept in touch. Bollobás's first publication was a joint paper with Erdős, onextremal problems in graph theory, written in 1962 while he was still in high school.^[10]

Bollobás became a student of mathematics atEötvös Loránd University, and with Erdős's recommendation toHarold Davenport (and a long struggle for permission with the Hungarian authorities) was able to spend an undergraduate year at theUniversity of Cambridge, in England. However, the authorities denied his request to return to Cambridge for doctoral study. A similar scholarship offer from Paris was also quashed. He wrote his first doctorate indiscrete geometry under the supervision ofLászló Fejes Tóth and Paul Erdős inBudapest University, 1967, after which he spent a year in Moscow withIsraïl Moiseevich Gelfand. After spending a year atChrist Church, Oxford, whereMichael Atiyah held the Savilian Chair of Geometry, he vowed never to return to Hungary due to his disillusion with the1956 Soviet intervention. He then went toTrinity College, Cambridge, where in 1972 he received a second PhD in functional analysis, studyingBanach algebras under the supervision ofFrank Adams.^[2][5] Bollobás recalled, "By then, I said to myself, 'If I ever manage to leave Hungary, I won't return.'" In 1970, he was awarded a fellowship at the college.^[11]

His main area of research is combinatorics, particularly graph theory. His chief interests are inextremal graph theory andrandom graph theory. In 1996 he resigned his university post, but remained a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Bollobás has been a Fellow ofTrinity College, Cambridge, since 1970; in 1996 he was appointed to the Jabie Hardin Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis, and in 2005 he was awarded a senior research fellowship at Trinity College.^[5]

Bollobás hasproved results on extremal graph theory, functional analysis, the theory of random graphs, graph polynomials andpercolation. For example, with Paul Erdős he proved results about the structure ofdense graphs; he was the first to prove detailed results about thephase transition in the evolution of random graphs; he proved that thechromatic number of the random graph onn vertices is asymptoticallyn/2 log n; withImre Leader he proved basic discreteisoperimetric inequalities; withRichard Arratia and Gregory Sorkin he constructed the interlace polynomial; with Oliver Riordan he introduced the ribbon polynomial (now called theBollobás–Riordan polynomial); with Andrew Thomason, József Balogh, Miklós Simonovits, Robert Morris andNoga Alon he studied monotone and hereditary graph properties; with Paul Smith and Andrew Uzzell he introduced and classified randomcellular automata with general homogeneous monotone update rules; with József Balogh, Hugo Duminil-Copin and Robert Morris he studiedbootstrap percolation; with Oliver Riordan he proved that the critical probability in randomVoronoi percolation in the plane is 1/2; and withSvante Janson and Oliver Riordan he introduced a very general model of heterogeneous sparse random graphs.

In addition to over 350 research papers on mathematics, Bollobás has written several books, including the research monographsExtremal Graph Theory in 1978,Random Graphs in 1985 andPercolation (with Oliver Riordan) in 2006, the introductory booksModern Graph Theory for undergraduate courses in 1979,Combinatorics andLinear Analysis in 1990, and the collection of problemsThe Art of Mathematics – Coffee Time in Memphis in 2006, with drawings by Gabriella Bollobás. He has also edited a number of books, includingLittlewood's Miscellany.

Bollobás's research students have includedKeith Ball at Warwick,Graham Brightwell atLSE,Timothy Gowers (who was awarded aFields Medal in 1998 and isRouse Ball Professor of Mathematics),Imre Leader at theUniversity of Cambridge,Jonathan Partington atLeeds,Charles Read atLeeds, who died in 2015, andAlexander Scott.^[12]

Bollobás is an External Member of theHungarian Academy of Sciences; in 2007 he was awarded theSenior Whitehead Prize by theLondon Mathematical Society.^[13] In 2011 he was elected aFellow of the Royal Society for his major contributions to manydifferent areas of mathematics within the broad field of combinatorics, including random graphs, percolation, extremal graphs, set systems and isoperimetric inequalities. The citation also recognises the profound influence of histextbooks in many of these areas, and his key role in establishing Britain as one of the leading countries in probabilistic and extremal combinatorics.^[14] In 2012 he became a fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society.^[15]

Bollobás was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society in 2011. His nomination reads

Béla 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, and more. In addition, through his classic textbooks, he has more or less defined many of these subjects. Britain is now one of the strongest countries for probabilistic and extremal combinatorics in the world: this is almost entirely due to Bollobás's influence.^[16]

In 1998 he was an invited speaker of theInternational Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.^[17] He was elected Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2013, a Member of the Academy of Europea in 2017 and a member of Academia Brasileira Ciencias (ABC) in 2023. He received an honorary doctorate from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań in 2013. In 2016 he received the Bocskai Prize, the Széchenyi Prize in 2017 and the 2023 Friend of Hungary Prize.

His father was a physician. His wife, Gabriella Bollobás, born inBudapest, was an actress and a musician in Hungary before moving to England to become a sculptor. She madebusts of mathematicians and scientists, includingPaul Erdős,Bill Tutte,George Batchelor,John von Neumann,Paul Dirac, andStephen Hawking, as well as a cast bronze ofDavid Hilbert.^[5] He has one son, Mark.

Bollobás is also a sportsman, having represented theUniversity of Oxford atmodern pentathlon and theUniversity of Cambridge at fencing.^[18][19]

• Extremal Graph Theory. Academic Press 1978,ISBN 978-0486435961^[20] Dover 2004 (seehere).
• Graph theory- an introductory course. Springer 1979,ISBN 978-1-4612-9969-1,doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-9967-7.
• Random Graphs. Academic Press 1985. Cambridge University Press 2001ISBN 978-0-521-79722-1,doi:10.1017/CBO9780511814068.
• Combinatorics - set systems, hypergraphs, families of vectors, and combinatorial probability. Cambridge University Press 1986ISBN 9780521337038.
• Linear Analysis – an introductory course. Cambridge University Press 1990, 1999ISBN 978-0521655774,doi:10.1017/CBO9781139168472.
• withAlan Baker,András Hajnal (ed.):A tribute to Paul Erdös. Cambridge University Press 1990doi:10.1017/CBO9780511983917,ISBN 978-0-521-60766-7.
• (ed.):Probabilistic combinatorics and its applications. American Mathematical Society 1991ISBN 978-0-8218-5500-3.
• with Andrew Thomason (ed.):Combinatorics, Geometry and Probability- a tribute to Paul Erdös. Cambridge University Press 1997doi:10.1017/CBO9780511662034,ISBN 978-0-521-60766-7.
• Modern Graph Theory. Springer 1998,doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-0619-4,ISBN 978-0387984889.^[21]
• (ed.):Contemporary Combinatorics. Springer und Janos Bolyai Mathematical Society, Budapest 2002ISBN 978-3-642-07660-2.
• with Oliver Riordan:Percolation. Cambridge University Press 2006doi:10.1017/CBO9781139167383,ISBN 978-0521872324.
• The Art of Mathematics – Coffee Time in Memphis. Cambridge University Press 2006doi:10.1017/CBO9780511816574,ISBN 978-0521693950 (with drawings by his wife Gabrielle Bollobás)
• with Robert Kozma, Dezső Miklós:Handbook of Large-Scale Random Networks. Springer 2009,doi:10.1007/978-3-540-69395-6,ISBN 978-3540693949.

• Interview in the magazine Imprints, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore
• Béla Bollobás on Budapest protest, January 2012

• 1943 births
• Living people
• 20th-century Hungarian mathematicians
• 21st-century Hungarian mathematicians
• Members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Graph theorists
• Combinatorialists
• Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
• Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
• University of Memphis faculty
• British fellows of the Royal Society
• British people of Hungarian descent
• International Mathematical Olympiad participants
• Scientists from Budapest
• Network scientists

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