Péter Frankl (born 26 March 1953 in

Kaposvár Kaposvár (; also known by alternative names) is a city with county rights in southwestern Hungary, south of Lake Balaton. It is one of the leading cities of Transdanubia, the capital of Somogy County, and the seat of the Kaposvár District and th ...

Somogy County Somogy (, ; ; , ) is an administrative county (Counties of Hungary, comitatus or ''vármegye'') in present Hungary, and also in the former Kingdom of Hungary. Somogy County lies in south-western Hungary, on the border with Croatia's Koprivnica- ...

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much 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 south, Croatia and ...

) is a

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

, street performer, columnist and educator, active in Japan. Frankl studied mathematics at

Eötvös Loránd University Eötvös Loránd University (, ELTE, also known as ''University of Budapest'') is a Hungarian public research university based in Budapest. Founded in 1635, ELTE is one of the largest and most prestigious public higher education institutions in ...

Budapest Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...

and submitted his PhD thesis while still an undergraduate. He holds a PhD degree from the University Paris Diderot as well. He has lived in Japan since 1988, where he is a well-known personality and often appears in the media. He keeps travelling around Japan performing (

juggling Juggling is a physical skill, performed by a juggler, involving the manipulation of objects for recreation, entertainment, art or sport. The most recognizable form of juggling is toss juggling. Juggling can be the manipulation of one object o ...

and giving public lectures on various topics). Frankl won a gold medal at the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. It is widely regarded as the most prestigious mathematical competition in the wor ...

in 1971. He has seven joint papers with

Paul Erdős Paul Erdős ( ; 26March 191320September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, g ...

, and eleven joint papers with

Ronald Graham Ronald Lewis Graham (October 31, 1935July 6, 2020) was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He ...

. His research is in

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...

, especially in extremal combinatorics. He is the author of the union-closed sets conjecture.

Personality

Both of his parents were survivors of concentration camps and taught him "The only things you own are in your heart and brain". So he became a mathematician. Frankl often lectures about racial discrimination.

Adolescence and abilities

He could multiply two digit numbers when he was four years old. Frankl speaks 12 languages (Hungarian, English, Russian, Swedish, French, Spanish, Polish, German, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Korean) and lectured mathematics in many countries in these languages. He has travelled to more than 100 countries.

Activities

Frankl learnt juggling from

. He and

Vojtěch Rödl Vojtěch Rödl (born 1 April 1949) is a Czech American mathematician, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory University. He is noted for his contributions mainly to combinatorics having authored hundreds of research papers. Academic Background ...

solved a $1000 problem of Paul Erdős. Zsolt Baranyai helped Frankl to get a scholarship in France, where he became a CNRS research fellow. For 1984 to 1990, Frankl and Akiyama worked hard organizing a Japanese mathematical Olympiad team, and as a consequence the Japanese team is now a regular participant of the

. Since 1998, he is an external member of the

Hungarian Academy of Sciences The Hungarian Academy of Sciences ( , MTA) is Hungary’s foremost and most prestigious learned society. Its headquarters are located along the banks of the Danube in Budapest, between Széchenyi rakpart and Akadémia utca. The Academy's primar ...

. He authored more than thirty books in Japanese, and with

László Babai László "Laci" Babai (born July 20, 1950, in Budapest) 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 (199 ...

, he wrote the manuscript of a book on "Linear Algebra Methods in Combinatorics". With Norihide Tokushige he is the coauthor of the book '' Extremal Problems For Finite Sets'' (American Mathematical Society, 2018).Reviews of ''Extremal Problems For Finite Sets'': * * *

Frankl conjecture

For any finite union-closed family of finite sets, other than the family consisting only of the empty set, there exists an element that belongs to at least half of the sets in the family.

References

External links