Béla Bollobás

Béla Bollobás is a Hungarian-born British mathematician, born on 3 August 1943, who has worked in functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory and percolation theory, and whose chief interests are extremal graph theory and random graph theory. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős from the age of 14, took part in the first three International Mathematical Olympiads, winning two gold medals, and wrote his first publication with Erdős on extremal problems in graph theory while still in high school. He earned a first doctorate in discrete geometry in Budapest in 1967 under László Fejes Tóth and Paul Erdős and a second doctorate in functional analysis at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1972 under Frank Adams. He has been a Fellow of Trinity College since 1970 and holds a chair of excellence at the University of Memphis.