World-renowned mathematicians will participate in two international academic conferences hosted between July 6th and 11th by the University of Debrecen.
- It is a great honour for Debrecen University to host two such important conferences, where “the cream” of mathematics is present, and it can only happen where talent is recognized - said
Zoltán Szilvássy, university rector, at the Tuesday press conference of the Journées Arithmétiques and Győry 75 conferences. He added that today the majority of science would be impossible without mathematics, being decisive, for example, in medicine in the analysis of neuronal networks, but also providing 80 percent of the background of functional magnetic resonance studies.
László Lovász, President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, emphasized at the conference that Debrecen is an important centre for number theory, producing leading results in the field of Diophantine number theory, in which the leading role was played by the school set up by Professor Kálmán Győry.
- Hungarian researchers are at the leading edge of international number theory studies, as we can see from the Diophantine equations already mentioned, the combinatorial number theory research linked to the name of Pál Erdős, Endre Szemerédi‘s Abel Prize, and the outstanding results produced in the field of prime numbers by Pál Turan – said the Wolf Prize-winning mathematician, who gave a lecture entitled "Border structures in graph theory and number theory" on Tuesday evening at the Journées Arithmétiques conference.
Over the five days of Europe's largest number theory conference 260 mathematicians arriving from all over the world heard 170 lectures. The organiser,
Attila Bérczes, noted at the press conference on Friday that the Journées Arithmétiques is held every two years, but only every second conference is held abroad, the rest being organised in France, where the event started.
Kálmán Győry, Szechenyi Prize-winning mathematician and former rector of the University, quoted the words of the German mathematician Gauss, that "mathematics is the queen of the sciences”, and added that number theory is the queen of mathematics.
- Number theory often deals with the solution to problems dating back over hundreds of years which, in the long term, determine the development of mathematics. These include Fermat's Last Theorem, in which the famous mathematician claimed that it is impossible to split a whole number to the power of an integer value greater than two into two similar integers. This 17th century conjecture was only proved by mathematicians in 1994. In addition to basic research and other fields of mathematics, the results of number theory can be used in information theory, information technology, cryptography, the military industry and medical science – Kálmán Győry explained.
The professor emeritus - whose 75th anniversary international conference will be held on Friday and Saturday - recalled that at the beginning of his career no one dealt with number theory at the University of Debrecen, but later more and more people joined him; thirteen students were awarded PhD degrees, of whom five have also become academic doctors.
Ákos Pintér, dean of the Faculty of Natural Science and Technology (TTK), and a former student of Kálmán Győry told the story of his first article, adding that the Győry 75 conference participants would get a complete picture of Kálmán Győry’s work, since at the two-day event thirteen researchers linked to his career would give lectures, among them the Abel Prize-winning mathematician, Endre Szemerédi.
- TTK, as an intensive research faculty, should support such conferences. At the same time we cannot forget a third event we are holding, the faculty’s summer camp in which the László Lovászes of the future can learn about the natural sciences and the career path for researchers - said the dean, Ákos Pintér.
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