Széchenyi Prize–winning Hungarian mathematician (2017)
Professor, University of Cambridge
Honorary Professor, University of Memphis
External Member, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1990)
Founding Member, KEMPELEN Academy of Sciences Foundation

Béla Bollobás is a world-renowned Hungarian mathematician,
internationally recognized for his fundamental contributions
to combinatorics and graph theory.
His sister is Enikő Bollobás, literary historian, translator,
and university professor.

Education and Early Achievements

As a member of the Hungarian team at the
International Mathematical Olympiads
between 1959 and 1961,
he won one second prize and two first prizes.

He completed his doctoral studies at the
University of Cambridge
and also spent a year studying at the
University of Oxford.
Since 1970, he has taught at the
University of Cambridge,
as a Fellow of Trinity College.

Research Areas and Scientific Work

His main fields of research are combinatorics
and graph theory.
He achieved seminal results in the theory of
extremal set systems
and random graphs,
and is one of the creators of the
Bishop–Phelps–Bollobás theorem.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the international mathematical journal
Combinatorics, Probability and Computing.
At the invitation of IBM,
he also served for several years as a scientific consultant.

Selected Books

• Graph Theory – Springer-Verlag, New York (1979)
• Combinatorics: Set Systems, Hypergraphs, Families of Vectors,
  and Combinatorial Probability – Cambridge University Press (1986)
• Modern Graph Theory – Springer-Verlag (1998)
• Random Graphs – Cambridge University Press (2001)
• Extremal Graph Theory – Dover Publications (2004)
• Handbook of Large-Scale Random Networks
  (co-authored with Róbert Kozma and Dezső Miklós) – Springer (2009)

Honors and Awards

His scientific achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards.
In 2024, he was awarded the
Commander’s Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit (Civil Division).