László Babai

László "Laci" Babai (born July 20, 1950, in Budapest) is a Hungarian-American professor of computer science and mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on computational complexity theory, algorithms, combinatorics, and finite groups, with an emphasis on the interactions between these fields.

Life In 1968, Babai won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Babai studied mathematics at Faculty of Science of the Eötvös Loránd University from 1968 to 1973, received a PhD from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1975, and received a DSc from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1984. He held a teaching position at Eötvös Loránd University since 1971; in 1987 he took joint positions as a professor in algebra at Eötvös Loránd and in computer science at the University of Chicago. In 1995, he began a joint appointment in the mathematics department at Chicago and gave up his position at Eötvös Loránd. the introduction of the term Las Vegas algorithm, and the introduction of group theoretic methods in graph isomorphism testing.

He is editor-in-chief of the refereed online journal Theory of Computing. Babai was also involved in the creation of the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program and coined the name.

Graph isomorphism in quasipolynomial time After announcing the result in 2015, Babai presented a paper proving that the graph isomorphism problem can be solved in quasi-polynomial time in 2016, at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. In response to an error discovered by Harald Helfgott, he posted an update in 2017.

Honors

In 1988, Babai won the Hungarian State Prize, in 1990 he was elected as a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 1994 he became a full member.

In 2005, he received the Quantrell Award.

In 2015, he was elected 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 (1994, plenary talk), and Rio de Janeiro (2018).