Alfréd Rényi

Alfréd Rényi was a Hungarian mathematician, born in Budapest on 30 March 1921 and dying there on 1 February 1970, who worked in probability theory, combinatorics, graph theory and number theory. He was the only child of Artur Rényi, a mechanical engineer and linguist of wide learning, and Barbara Alexander, and he received a literary rather than a scientific schooling, keeping a lifelong love of literature and of the philosophers of ancient Greece. His name is attached to results on random graphs, and he is a leading figure of the Hungarian school of probability and discrete mathematics.