János Horváth

John Michael Horvath (born János Horváth; 30 July 1924 – 12 March 2015) was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He is noted for his contributions to analysis, especially in functional analysis and distribution theory.

Early life Horvath was born János Horváth on 30 July 1924 in Budapest.

Education and career Horvath received his doctorate in 1947 from the University of Budapest as a student of Lipót Fejér and Frigyes Riesz. Four other talented mathematicians also graduated in the class of 1947: János Aczél, Ákos Császár, László Fuchs and István Gál. Together with Horvath, they were referred to as the Big Five. In 1957 Horvath finally went to the United States, where he taught at the University of Maryland until 1994 and was then awarded the title of Professor Emeritus.

It was Schwartz, who recommended him to write elementary textbook on distribution theory. MathSciNet called his book Topological Vector Spaces and Distributions (1966), "The most readable introduction to the theory of vector spaces available in English and possibly any other language." In 2006, Horvath edited and wrote one of the chapters (Holomorphic Functions) for A Panorama of Hungarian Mathematics in the Twentieth Century. In 1997, he received an honorary doctorate of the Universidad de los Andes. And in 1998, he became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 2001 he was elected to the Colombian Academy of Sciences.

Works (1966) Topological Vector Spaces and Distributions Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts. (2005) A Panorama of Hungarian Mathematics in the Twentieth Century Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.