János Pach (born May 3, 1954) is a mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of combinatorics and

discrete and computational geometry '' Discrete & Computational Geometry'' is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by Springer. Founded in 1986 by Jacob E. Goodman and Richard M. Pollack, the journal publishes articles on discrete geometry and computational geome ...

Biography

Pach was born and grew up in

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

. He comes from a noted academic family: his father, (1919–2001) was a well-known historian, and his mother Klára (née Sós, 1925–2020) was a university mathematics teacher; his maternal aunt

Vera T. Sós Vera T. Sós (born September 11, 1930) is a Hungarian mathematician, specializing in number theory and combinatorics. She was a student and close collaborator of both Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi. She also collaborated frequently with her h ...

and her husband

Pál Turán Pál Turán (; 18 August 1910 – 26 September 1976) also known as Paul Turán, was a Hungarian mathematician who worked primarily in extremal combinatorics. He had a long collaboration with fellow Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, lasting ...

are two of the best-known Hungarian mathematicians. Pach received his

Candidate A candidate, or nominee, is the prospective recipient of an award or honor, or a person seeking or being considered for some kind of position; for example: * to be elected to an office — in this case a candidate selection procedure occurs. * ...

degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1983, where his advisor was Miklós Simonovits. Since 1977, he has been affiliated with the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.Research Fellows
Rényi Institute He was Research Professor at the

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU), and is among the most prestigious mathematics schools and mathematical sciences research cente ...

NYU New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

Personal website of János Pach
NYU (since 1986), Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at City College, CUNY (1992-2011), and Neilson Professor at Smith College (2008-2009). Between 2008 and 2019, he was Professor of the Chair of Combinatorial Geometry at

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

.János Pach appointed as a full professor of mathematics
EPFL, December 12, 2007. He was the program chair for the

International Symposium on Graph Drawing The International Symposium on Graph Drawing (GD) is an annual academic conference in which researchers present peer reviewed papers on graph drawing, information visualization of network information, geometric graph theory, and related topics. ...

in 2004 and

Symposium on Computational Geometry The International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG) is an academic conference in computational geometry. It was founded in 1985, and was originally sponsored by the SIGACT and SIGGRAPH Special Interest Groups of the Association for Computi ...

in 2015. He is co-editor-in-chief of the journal ''

Discrete and Computational Geometry '' Discrete & Computational Geometry'' is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by Springer. Founded in 1986 by Jacob E. Goodman and Richard M. Pollack, the journal publishes articles on discrete geometry and computational geome ...

'', and he serves on the editorial boards of several other journals including ''

Combinatorica ''Combinatorica'' is an international journal of mathematics, publishing papers in the fields of combinatorics and computer science. It started in 1981, with László Babai and László Lovász as the editors-in-chief with Paul Erdős as honora ...

'', ''

SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics '' SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics'' is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The journal includes articles on pure and applied discrete mathematics. It was estab ...

'', ''Computational Geometry'', ''

Graphs and Combinatorics ''Graphs and Combinatorics'' (ISSN 0911-0119, abbreviated ''Graphs Combin.'') is a peer-reviewed academic journal in graph theory, combinatorics, and discrete geometry published by Springer Japan. Its editor-in-chief is Katsuhiro Ota of Keio Univ ...

'', ''Central European Journal of Mathematics'', and ''Moscow Journal of Combinatorics and Number Theory''. He was an invited speaker at the Combinatorics session of the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Seoul, 2014.List of Speakers at ICM.
/ref> He was a plenary speaker at the

European Congress of Mathematics The European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) is the second largest international conference of the mathematics community, after the International Congresses of Mathematicians (ICM). The ECM are held every four years and are timed precisely betwe ...

(Portorož), 2021.List of Plenary Speakers at ECM.
/ref>

Research

Pach has authored several books and over 300 research papers. He was one of the most frequent collaborators of Paul Erdős, authoring over 20 papers with him and thus has an

Erdős number The Erdős number () describes the "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual ...

of one. Pach's research is focused in the areas of combinatorics and

discrete geometry Discrete geometry and combinatorial geometry are branches of geometry that study combinatorial properties and constructive methods of discrete geometric objects. Most questions in discrete geometry involve finite or discrete sets of basic ge ...

. In 1981, he solved Ulam's problem, showing that there exists no universal planar graph. In the early 90sAMS Meeting
/ref> together with Micha Perles, he initiated the systematic study of extremal problems on topological and geometric graphs. Some of Pach's most-cited research work concerns the combinatorial complexity of families of curves in the plane and their applications to

motion planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is use ...

problems the maximum number of k-sets and halving lines that a planar point set may have, crossing numbers of graphs, embedding of planar graphs onto fixed sets of points, and lower bounds for epsilon-nets.. .

Awards and honors

Pach received the Grünwald Medal of the

János Bolyai Mathematical Society The János Bolyai Mathematical Society (Bolyai János Matematikai Társulat, BJMT) is the Hungarian mathematical society, named after János Bolyai, a 19th-century Hungarian mathematician, a co-discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry. It is the profes ...

(1982), the Ford Award from the Mathematical Association of America (1990), and the

Alfréd Rényi Prize The Alfréd Rényi Prize is awarded biennially by the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Science The Hungarian Academy of Sciences ( hu, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, MTA) is the most important and prestigious le ...

from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1992). He was an Erdős Lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2005. In 2011 he was listed as a

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the Association for Computing Machinery for his research in computational geometry. In 2014 he was elected as a member of

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

, and in 2015 as a

of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

"for contributions to discrete and combinatorial geometry and to convexity and combinatorics." In 2022 he was elected corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences..

Books

*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *.

References

External links