József Beck

József Beck, born in Budapest in 1952, is the Harold H. Martin Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. His contributions to combinatorics include the partial colouring lemma and the Beck-Fiala theorem in discrepancy theory, the algorithmic version of the Lovász local lemma, the two extremes theorem in combinatorial geometry and the second moment method in the theory of positional games. In 1985 he was awarded the Fulkerson Prize for a paper showing that Roth estimate of the discrepancy of integer sequences is nearly sharp, which introduced the notion of discrepancy on hypergraphs. He gave an invited talk at the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians and is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2004. His books include Irregularities of Distribution with William Chen and Combinatorial Games: Tic-Tac-Toe Theory.