Szemerédi was born in Budapest. Since his parents wished him to become a doctor, Szemerédi enrolled at a college of medicine, but he dropped out after six months (in an interview[2] he explained it: "I was not sure I could do work bearing such responsibility.").[3][4][5] He studied at the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and received his PhD from Moscow State University. His adviser was Israel Gelfand.[6] This stemmed from a misspelling, as Szemerédi originally wanted to study with Alexander Gelfond.[3]
Endre Szemerédi has published over 200 scientific articles in the fields of discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science, arithmetic combinatorics and discrete geometry. He is best known for his proof from 1975 of an old conjecture of Paul Erdős and Pál Turán: if a sequence of natural numbers has positive upper density then it contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. This is now known as Szemerédi's theorem. One of the lemmas introduced in his proof is now known as the Szemerédi regularity lemma, which has become an important lemma in combinatorics, being used for instance in property testing for graphs and in the theory of graph limits.
In 2012, Szemerédi was awarded the Abel Prize "for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, and in recognition of the profound and lasting impact of these contributions on additive number theory and ergodic theory"[21] The Abel Prize citation also credited Szemerédi with bringing combinatorics to the centre-stage of mathematics and noted his place in the tradition of Hungarian mathematicians such as George Pólya who emphasized a problem-solving approach to mathematics.[22] Szemerédi reacted to the announcement by saying that "It is not my own personal achievement, but recognition for this field of mathematics and Hungarian mathematicians," that gave him the most pleasure.[23]
Prior to the conference a volume of the Bolyai Society Mathematical Studies Series, An Irregular Mind, a collection of papers edited by Imre Bárány and József Solymosi, was published to celebrate Szemerédi's achievements on the occasion of his 70th birthday.[25] Another conference devoted to celebrating Szemerédi's work is
the Third Abel Conference: A Mathematical Celebration of Endre Szemerédi.[26]
Personal life
Szemerédi is married to Anna Kepes; they have five children, Andrea, Anita, Peter, Kati, and Zsuzsi.[19][27]
^Bárány, Imre; Solymosi, József; Sági, Gábor (2010). An Irregular Mind: Szemerédi is 70. Bolyai Society Mathematical Studies. Vol. 21. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-14444-8. ISBN978-3-642-14443-1.