Endre Szemerédi spoke about combinatorics, number theory, algorithm theory, but also about the most important stages of his life — from a professional perspective — in the program Closer to Mathematics.
The Abel Prize-winning mathematician was born in Budapest in 1940. He began his university studies in 1960 at the Faculty of Science of Eötvös Loránd University. In the 1970s, he achieved the most outstanding results of his successful career. He proved a conjecture formulated by Erdős and Turán in 1936. The so-called regularity lemma developed for this purpose later became an important tool in the research of large graphs, which also influenced network theory.
From the 1980s, he was a visiting researcher and visiting professor at several American universities. In 1990, he was appointed as a university professor at the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University; after retiring, he became a professor emeritus at the university. “He is a very versatile scientist, whose work will be known even in a thousand years,” said the then president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences when Endre Szemerédi received the Abel Prize in 2012... Why did he turn to mathematics, how did his research career begin, who influenced him, and what questions are currently preoccupying the emeritus professor of the Rényi Institute? — this was discussed in the program Closer to Mathematics on Trend Fm and Radiocafé.