László Bélády
Hungarian computer scientist
About László Bélády
Lived 1928 – 2021 (aged 93). László Bélády was a Hungarian computer scientist, mechanical engineer, businessperson and military flight engineer.
László "Les" Bélády (April 29, 1928, in Budapest – November 6, 2021) was a Hungarian computer scientist notable for devising the Bélády's Min theoretical memory caching algorithm in 1966 while working at IBM Research. He also demonstrated the existence of a Bélády's anomaly. During the 1980s, he was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
Education Bélády earned B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, then an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering at the Technical University of Budapest in 1950.
Life and career He left Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Then he worked as a draftsman at Ford Motor Company in Cologne and as an aerodynamics engineer at Dassault in Paris. In 1961, he immigrated to the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, he primarily lived in New York City with stints in California and England, where he joined International Business Machines and did early work in operating systems, virtual machine architectures, program behavior modeling, memory management, computer graphics, Asian character sets, and data security.
Attainment Bélády is known for the "Belady Algorithm", the OPT (or MIN) Page Replacement Algorithm. He co-designed and built IBM M44/44X, an experimental machine which is the first computer with multiple virtual machine organization. He is co-founder of an industrial research consortium, the MCC. Bélády also participated in the design of the earliest commercial time-sharing systems, the TSS-67.
Awards 1969 & 1973: IBM Outstanding Contribution Awards 1988: IEEE "for contributions to the design of large software systems" 1990: J. D. Warnier Prize for Excellence in Information
Publications Belady, Laszlo A., "A Study of Replacement Algorithms for a Virtual Storage Computer," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2 June 1966, pp. 78–10. Belady, Laszlo A., and Meir L. Lehman, Program Evolution, Processes of Software Change, Academic Press, London, 1985.
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Important facts
Contemporaries
People whose lives overlapped László Bélády's
Frequently asked questions
Who was László Bélády?
Hungarian computer scientist (1928–2021)
When was László Bélády born?
László Bélády was born on 29 April 1928 in Budapest.
When did László Bélády die?
László Bélády died on 6 November 2021.
What was László Bélády's occupation?
László Bélády was a computer scientist, mechanical engineer, businessperson and military flight engineer.
What nationality was László Bélády?
László Bélády was Hungarian.
Sources & further reading
Cite this page
APA: Biography.guide. (2026). László Bélády. https://biography.guide/laszlo-belady/
MLA: "László Bélády." Biography.guide, https://biography.guide/laszlo-belady/.
Chicago: "László Bélády." Biography.guide. https://biography.guide/laszlo-belady/.
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