László Lovász (Budapest, 9 March 1948) is a world-renowned researcher in discrete mathematics and computer science. Significant new areas of research have emerged from his creative contributions. His many achievements include the proof of the weak perfect graph conjecture and the conjecture about the chromatic number of Kneser graphs. Via an unexpected application of geometric representations of graphs, he solved a major open problem in information theory, Shannon’s pentagon problem. His name is attached to the Lovász local lemma, which is a tool for proving the existence of rare combinatorial objects, and the Lenstra--Lenstra--Lovász base reduction algorithm, whose great importance is due in part to its applications in cryptography. Since the early 2000s, he has also achieved outstanding results in the area of large networks and graph limits.  He is author or co-author of twelve books and more than three hundred scientific publications, with more than twenty thousand independent references.

He is the recipient of the most prestigious international awards in mathematics, including the Fulkerson, Wolf, Knuth, Gödel, Kyoto and Abel Prizes. He is a former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the International Mathematical Union, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). In addition to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, he is a foreign or honorary member of several further prestigious academies. He is an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He has worked for extended periods of time at József Attila University in Szeged, Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Princeton University, Yale University, and as a researcher at Microsoft. He is currently a Research Professor at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics and Professor Emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University. He holds honorary doctorates from Calgary, ELTE, Yale and several other universities.