László Babai
Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist
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Life
In 1968, Babai won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Babai studied mathematics at Faculty of Science of the Eötvös Loránd University from 1968 to 1973, received a PhD from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1975, and received a DSc from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1984. He held a teaching position at Eötvös Loránd University since 1971; in 1987 he took joint positions as a professor in algebra at Eötvös Loránd and in computer science at the University of Chicago. In 1995, he began a joint appointment in the mathematics department at Chicago and gave up his position at Eötvös Loránd.
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Work
He is the author of over 180 academic papers. His notable accomplishments include the introduction of interactive proof systems, the introduction of the term Las Vegas algorithm, and the introduction of group theoretic methods in graph isomorphism testing. In November 2015, he announced a quasipolynomial time algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem.
He is editor-in-chief of the refereed online journal Theory of Computing. Babai was also involved in the creation of the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program and coined the name.
Graph isomorphism in quasipolynomial time
After announcing the result in 2015, Babai presented a paper proving that the graph isomorphism problem can be solved in quasi-polynomial time in 2016, at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. In response to an error discovered by Harald Helfgott, he posted an update in 2017.
Honors
In 1988, Babai won the Hungarian State Prize, in 1990 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 1994 he became a full member. In 1999 the Budapest University of Technology and Economics awarded him an honorary doctorate.
In 1993, Babai was awarded the Gödel Prize together with Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Shlomo Moran, and Charles Rackoff, for their papers on interactive proof systems.
In 2005, he received the Quantrell Award.
In 2015, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and won the Knuth Prize.
Babai was an invited speaker at the International Congresses of Mathematicians in Kyoto (1990), Zürich (1994, plenary talk), and Rio de Janeiro (2018).