Gábor Domokos (born 12 November 1961) is a Hungarian mathematician and engineer. He is best known for his 2006 discovery of the

Gömböc A gömböc () is any member of a class of convex set, convex, three-dimensional and homogeneous bodies that are ''mono-monostatic'', meaning that they have just one stable and one unstable Mechanical equilibrium, point of equilibrium when r ...

, a class of three-dimensional (3D) convex bodies that have one stable and one unstable point of balance. Their shape helped to relate the body structure of some

tortoise Tortoises ( ) are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like o ...

s and their ability to recover after being placed upside down.

Career

Domokos spent most of his career at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), where he received his MSc degree in architecture and engineering in 1986, and defended a PhD in 1989 and

habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...

in 1996. He became a full professor at BME in 1996, and in 2002 was appointed as head of Department of Mechanics, Materials and Structures. In 1989–1999 Domokos spent one year teaching at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

where he is adjunct professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. In 2004 he has been elected as the youngest 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 ...

– first as a corresponding member and since 2010 as a full member. In 2008-2009 he spent one year as a Visiting Fellow Commoner at

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

. In 2015 Domokos gave the Hooke Lectur

at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

on the

and natural shape evolution.

Research

Domokos is mostly known for his work on mono-monostatic bodies, that is, convex bodies that have one stable and one unstable point of balance. In 1995 he met the prominent Russian mathematician

Vladimir Arnold Vladimir Igorevich Arnold (or Arnol'd; , ; 12 June 1937 – 3 June 2010) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He is best known for the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem regarding the stability of integrable systems, and contributed to s ...

, who suggested that 3D mono-monostatic bodies do exist and urged Domokos to find one. Aided by his wife, Domokos developed a classification system for 3D objects based on their points of equilibrium by analyzing pebbles and noting their equilibrium points. In one experiment, the couple tried 2000 pebbles collected at the beaches of the

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

island of

Rhodes Rhodes (; ) is the largest of the Dodecanese islands of Greece and is their historical capital; it is the List of islands in the Mediterranean#By area, ninth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Administratively, the island forms a separ ...

and found no single mono-monostatic body among them, illustrating the difficulty of the problem. In 2006 Domokos and his student Péter Várkonyi theoretically found a stable class of mono-monostatic solutions, which they named gömböc (a diminutive of ''gömb'' meaning a "sphere" in Hungarian). Since then they manufactured a series of gömböcs for various institutions, museums and exhibitions, such as the World Expo 2010. They also applied their gömböc-inspired shape analysis to the evolution of tortoises, relating their body structure and the ability to recover after being placed upside down. On 13 February 2009, a gömböc appeared on

BBC One BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's oldest and flagship channel, and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includes BBC News television b ...

Friday night show '' QI'', where the host

Stephen Fry Sir Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer. He came to prominence as a member of the comic act Fry and Laurie alongside Hugh Laurie, with the two starring in ''A Bit of ...

demonstrated its properties and Domokos, who was present in the audience, explained its history and relation to turtles.Gömböc ("QI": Series F Episode 8)
Youtube.com (12 July 2009). Retrieved on 22 June 2011. In 2015, Domokos and his co-authors expanded their previous shape analysis of terrestrial pebbles to Martian rocks.

Awards

* Knight's Cross of the Republic of Hungary (2007).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Domokos, Gabor Living people 1961 births 20th-century Hungarian mathematicians 21st-century Hungarian mathematicians