Biography:János Pach

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Short description: Hungarian mathematician
János Pach
Janos Pach GD09.jpg
János Pach at Graph Drawing 2009
Born (1954-05-03) May 3, 1954 (age 70)
Hungary
Alma materEötvös Loránd University, Hungary, (M.S., Math., 1977; Ph.D., Math., 1981)
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, (Candidate, 1983; Doctorate, 1995)[1]
Occupationprofessor and mathematician
Known forcombinatorics and computational geometry

János Pach (born May 3, 1954)[2] is a mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of combinatorics and discrete and computational geometry.

Biography

Pach was born and grew up in Hungary. He comes from a noted academic family: his father, Zsigmond Pál Pach (hu) (1919–2001) was a well-known historian, and his mother Klára (née Sós, 1925–2020) was a university mathematics teacher;[3] his maternal aunt Vera T. Sós and her husband Pál Turán are two of the best-known Hungarian mathematicians.[4]

Pach received his Candidate degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1983, where his advisor was Miklós Simonovits.[5]

Since 1977, he has been affiliated with the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.[6]

He was Research Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU[1] (since 1986), Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at City College, CUNY (1992-2011), and Neilson Professor at Smith College (2008-2009).

Between 2008 and 2019, he was Professor of the Chair of Combinatorial Geometry at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.[2][7]

He was the program chair for the International Symposium on Graph Drawing in 2004 and Symposium on Computational Geometry in 2015. He is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Discrete and Computational Geometry, and he serves on the editorial boards of several other journals including Combinatorica, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Computational Geometry, Graphs and Combinatorics, Central European Journal of Mathematics, and Moscow Journal of Combinatorics and Number Theory.

He was an invited speaker at the Combinatorics session of the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Seoul, 2014.[8] He was a plenary speaker at the European Congress of Mathematics (Portorož), 2021.[9]

Research

Pach has authored several books and over 300 research papers. He was one of the most frequent collaborators of Paul Erdős, authoring over 20 papers with him and thus has an Erdős number of one.[10]

Pach's research is focused in the areas of combinatorics and discrete geometry. In 1981, he solved Ulam's problem, showing that there exists no universal planar graph.[11] In the early 90s[12] together with Micha Perles, he initiated the systematic study of extremal problems on topological and geometric graphs.

Some of Pach's most-cited research work[13] concerns the combinatorial complexity of families of curves in the plane and their applications to motion planning problems[14][15] the maximum number of k-sets and halving lines that a planar point set may have,[16] crossing numbers of graphs,[17][18] embedding of planar graphs onto fixed sets of points,[19][20] and lower bounds for epsilon-nets.[21][22]

Awards and honors

Pach received the Grünwald Medal of the János Bolyai Mathematical Society (1982), the Ford Award from the Mathematical Association of America (1990), and the Alfréd Rényi Prize from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1992).[23][24][25] He was an Erdős Lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2005. In 2011 he was listed as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his research in computational geometry.[26] In 2014 he was elected as a member of Academia Europaea,[25] and in 2015 as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to discrete and combinatorial geometry and to convexity and combinatorics."[27] In 2022 he was elected corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.[28]

Books

See also

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Personal website of János Pach, NYU
  2. 2.0 2.1 János Pach appointed as a full professor of mathematics, EPFL, December 12, 2007.
  3. Pach Zsigmond Pálné (Sós Klára) (1925−2020), in Hungarian
  4. Interview with János Pach (2013), in Hungarian
  5. János Pach at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. Research Fellows, Rényi Institute
  7. Chair of Combinatorial Geometry, EPFL
  8. List of Speakers at ICM.
  9. List of Plenary Speakers at ECM.
  10. Computing Your Erdös Number
  11. Pach, János (1981), "A problem of Ulam on planar graphs", European Journal of Combinatorics 2 (4): 357–361, doi:10.1016/s0195-6698(81)80043-1 
  12. AMS Meeting
  13. Google scholar, retrieved October 23, 2008.
  14. Kedem, Klara; Livne, Ron; Pach, János; Sharir, Micha (1986), "On the union of Jordan regions and collision-free translational motion amidst polygonal obstacles", Discrete & Computational Geometry 1 (1): 59–71, doi:10.1007/BF02187683 .
  15. Edelsbrunner, Herbert; Guibas, Leonidas J.; Pach, János; Pollack, Richard; Seidel, Raimund; Sharir, Micha, "Arrangements of curves in the plane: topology, combinatorics, and algorithms", 15th Int. Colloq. Automata, Languages and Programming, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 317, Springer-Verlag, pp. 214–229 .
  16. Pach, János; Steiger, William; Szemerédi, Endre (1992), "An upper bound on the number of planar K-sets", Discrete & Computational Geometry 7 (1): 109–123, doi:10.1007/BF02187829 .
  17. Pach, János; Tóth, Géza (1997), "Graphs drawn with few crossings per edge", Combinatorica 17 (3): 427–439, doi:10.1007/BF01215922 .
  18. Pach, János; Tóth, Géza (2000), "Which crossing number is it, anyway?", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B 80 (2): 225–246, doi:10.1006/jctb.2000.1978 .
  19. de Fraysseix, Hubert; Pach, János; Pollack, Richard (1988), "Small sets supporting Fáry embeddings of planar graphs", Proc. 20th ACM Symp. Theory of Computing, pp. 426–433, doi:10.1145/62212.62254, http://purl.umn.edu/4760 .
  20. Pach, János; Wenger, Rephael (2001), "Embedding planar graphs at fixed vertex locations", Graphs and Combinatorics 17 (4): 717–728, doi:10.1007/PL00007258 .
  21. Komlós, János; Pach, János; Woeginger, Gerhard (1992), "Almost tight bounds for ε-nets.", Discrete & Computational Geometry 7 (2): 163–173, doi:10.1007/bf02187833 .
  22. Pach, János; Tardos, Gábor (2013), "Tight lower bounds for the size of epsilon-nets", Journal of the American Mathematical Society 26 (3): 645–658, doi:10.1090/s0894-0347-2012-00759-0 .
  23. Rényi-díj, Alfred Rényi Institute of Mathematics, http://www.math-inst.hu/renyi_dij.html, retrieved 8 March 2010 
  24. Short biography , from SFU Computing Science.
  25. 25.0 25.1 Hasani, Ilire; Hoffmann, Robert. "Academy of Europe: Pach János". https://www.ae-info.org/ae/Member/Pach_J%C3%A1nos. 
  26. ACM Names Fellows for Computing Advances that Are Driving Innovation , Association for Computing Machinery, December 8, 2011.
  27. 2016 Class of the Fellows of the AMS, American Mathematical Society, https://www.ams.org/profession/ams-fellows/new-fellows, retrieved 2015-11-16 .
  28. Corresponding members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, https://mta.hu/mta_tagjai, retrieved 2022-05-21 .

External links