The Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal for the year 2021 has been awarded to Professor László Stachó

 Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal, year 2021

The Bolyai Institute of the University of Szeged is pleased to announce that
on the proposal of the editorial board of the journal Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum (Szeged)
the Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal for the year 2021 has been awarded to

Stacho

Dr. László Stachó
Professor Emeritus (Bolyai Institute, University of Szeged)

The Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal was founded in 1999 by Erzsébet Szőkefalvi-Nagy in memory of her father Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy, who served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum from 1946 to 1981. The Medal is awarded annually by the Bolyai Institute to honour a distinguished mathematician who has published significant results in the journal.

László Stachó's scientific interests and work are diverse. Among other things, early in his research career, he studied the extensions of Federer's curvature measures and minimax theorems. However, his entire work is dominated by the study of Banach manifolds and related algebraic structures.

His most significant discovery is the so-called projection principle which was published in our Acta. This result gained great importance in the study of the biholomorphic automorphism group of Banach manifolds, which is closely related to the classification problem of symmetric domains in Banach spaces (which aims to extend Cartan's famous 1935 result from the finite-dimensional case to infinite dimension). In particular, his result played a significant role in the nonlinear extension of the classical operator theoretical bidualization, with which it was possible to verify that the study of biholomorphic automorphisms of bounded symmetric domains in Banach spaces and the study of certain algebraic structures, the so-called JB*-triples, are equivalent problems, and concerning these latter structures, bidualization led to a new nonlinear generalization of the Gelfand-Neumark theorem.

László Stachó published high-impact papers in Acta Sci. Math. (Szeged) on each of the three topics mentioned above. The total number of his papers in the journal is 14.

Due to the current pandemic the official award ceremony of the Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal will be held at a later date.