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Jenő Elek Egerváry (April 16, 1891 – November 30, 1958) was a Hungarian
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 ...
.


Biography

Egerváry was born in
Debrecen Debrecen ( ; ; ; ) is Hungary's cities of Hungary, second-largest city, after Budapest, the regional centre of the Northern Great Plain Regions of Hungary, region and the seat of Hajdú-Bihar County. A city with county rights, it was the large ...
in 1891. In 1914, he received his doctorate at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, where he studied under the supervision of
Lipót Fejér Lipót Fejér (or Leopold Fejér, ; 9 February 1880 – 15 October 1959) was a Hungarian mathematician of Jewish heritage. Fejér was born Leopold Weisz, and changed to the Hungarian name Fejér around 1900. Biography He was born in Pécs, Au ...
. He then worked as an assistant at the Seismological Observatory in Budapest, and since 1918 as a professor at the Superior Industrial School in Budapest. In 1938 he was appointed
Privatdozent ''Privatdozent'' (for men) or ''Privatdozentin'' (for women), abbreviated PD, P.D. or Priv.-Doz., is an academic title conferred at some European universities, especially in German-speaking countries, to someone who holds certain formal qualifi ...
at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest. In 1941 he became a full professor at the Technical University of Budapest, and in 1950 he was appointed Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Research Institute for Applied Mathematics 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 ...
. Egerváry received the
Gyula Kőnig Gyula Kőnig (16 December 1849 – 8 April 1913) was a mathematician from Hungary. His mathematical publications in German appeared under the name Julius König. His son Dénes Kőnig was a graph theorist. Biography Gyula Kőnig was active lite ...
Prize in 1932 and the
Kossuth Prize The Kossuth Prize (, ) is a state-sponsored award in Hungary, named after the Hungarian politician and revolutionist Lajos Kossuth. The Prize was established in 1936, by the Hungarian National Assembly, to acknowledge outstanding personal and grou ...
in 1949 and 1953. He committed suicide in 1958 because of the troubles caused to him by the communist bureaucracy.


Works

Egerváry's interests spanned the theory of algebraic equations,
geometry Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...
, differential equations, and
matrix theory In mathematics, a matrix (: matrices) is a rectangular array or table of numbers, symbols, or expressions, with elements or entries arranged in rows and columns, which is used to represent a mathematical object or property of such an object. ...
. In what later became a classic result in the field of
combinatorial optimization Combinatorial optimization is a subfield of mathematical optimization that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects, where the set of feasible solutions is discrete or can be reduced to a discrete set. Typical combina ...
, Egerváry generalized Kőnig's theorem to the case of weighted graphs. This contribution was translated and published in 1955 by Harold W. Kuhn, who also showed how to apply Kőnig's and Egerváry's method to solve the
assignment problem The assignment problem is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem. In its most general form, the problem is as follows: :The problem instance has a number of ''agents'' and a number of ''tasks''. Any agent can be assigned to perform any t ...
; the resulting algorithm has since been known as the " Hungarian method".


See also

* Kőnig–Egerváry theorem


Notes


References

* * * *


External links


Egerváry Research Group on Combinatorial Optimization
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Egervary, Jeno 20th-century Hungarian mathematicians 1891 births 1958 deaths 1958 suicides Suicides in Hungary