Gyula Y. Katona

Gyula Y. Katona (; born 4 December 1965) is a Hungarian mathematician working in graph theory and combinatorics. He is a professor and head of the Department of Computer Science and Information Theory at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research concerns Hamiltonian cycles in graphs and hypergraphs, graph toughness, factors, and graph pebbling. In 2026 he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary.

Early life and education Katona was born in Budapest in 1965, the son of the mathematician Gyula O. H. Katona. He attended the Fazekas Mihály Gimnázium and studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University from 1986 to 1991. His diploma thesis, A Few Versions of the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem, was supervised by László Lovász and András Recski. In 2024 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was a visiting professor at Arizona State University in 2006–2007, and has taught in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics programme since 2003 and at the Aquincum Institute of Technology since 2010. His other work includes results on graph toughness and its edge and local variants, on factors of graphs, on Hamiltonian-saturated graphs and hypergraphs, and on graph pebbling and rubbling.

He is the coauthor of three textbooks: Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Algorithms (with András Recski, Technical University of Budapest, 1993), Introduction to Finite Mathematics (Eötvös Loránd University, 1993) and Introduction to Computer Science (Typotex, Budapest, 2002). Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary, civil division (2026), for his research on hypergraphs and his role in the mathematical education of engineers