Laszlo Erdös becomes external member of Hungarian Academy of Sciences

IST Austria Professor Laszlo Erdös has been appointed external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. At the last election meeting, held every three years, he was elected member of the mathematics section. The Academicians’ Assembly admitted altogether 80 new members, including 31 full, 26 corresponding and 23 external members. Currently, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has a total of 200 external members in 11 sections.
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, MTA) is the oldest scientific institution in Hungary. Founded by Count István Széchenyi in 1825, MTA is a public body consisting of academicians and scholars with a science degree obtained or naturalized in Hungary. As a self-regulatory legal entity, it procures a national public duty by practicing, supporting, overseeing and representing science.

Laszlo Erdös, born in 1966, studied mathematics at the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest and did his PhD with Elliott H. Lieb at Princeton University. After holding junior positions at ETH Zurich and the Courant Institute (NYU), he worked at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. In 2003 he became Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and in 2013 he joined IST Austria.

Erdös studies mathematical analysis and probability theory, focusing on problems arising from physics. His early research was in the area of quantum mechanics. Later, his interest shifted to questions on disordered systems, especially on spectral universality of large random matrices. Recently, he solved two long-standing problems related to the Wigner-Dyson-Mehta conjecture in the theory of random matrices.