Nationality Hungary Doctoral advisor Denes Konig | Role Mathematician Name Tibor Gallai Awards Academy Prize | |
Institutions Eotvos Lorand University Doctoral students Jeno LehelLaszlo Lovasz Education Budapest University of Technology and Economics Similar People Laszlo Lovasz, Denes Konig, Uriel Feige, Sanjeev Arora, Shafi Goldwasser | ||
Tibor Gallai (born Tibor Grünwald, 15 July 1912 – 2 January 1992) was a Hungarian mathematician. He worked in combinatorics, especially in graph theory, and was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Paul Erdős. He was a student of Dénes Kőnig and an advisor of László Lovász. He was a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1991).
His main results
The Edmonds–Gallai decomposition theorem, which was proved independently by Gallai and Jack Edmonds, describes finite graphs from the point of view of matchings. Gallai also proved, with Milgram, Dilworth's theorem in 1947, but as they hesitated to publish the result, Dilworth independently discovered and published it.
Gallai was the first to prove the higher-dimensional version of van der Waerden's theorem.
With Paul Erdős he gave a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence to be the degree sequence of a graph, known as the Erdős–Gallai theorem.