Alfréd Rényi (1921 - 1970)

Born 20 Mar 1921 in Budapest, Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun, Hungary

Ancestors

Husband of Katalin Schulhof — married 1946 in Budapest, Hungary

Died 1 Feb 1970 at age 48 in Budapest, Hungary

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Biography

Alfréd Rényi is Notable.

Alfréd was born in 1921. He passed away in 1970. He was a Hungarian mathematician known for his work in probability theory, though he also made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory. In information theory, he introduced the spectrum of Rényi entropies of order α, giving an important generalisation of the Shannon entropy and the Kullback–Leibler divergence. The Rényi entropies give a spectrum of useful diversity indices, and lead to a spectrum of fractal dimensions. The Rényi–Ulam game is a guessing game where some of the answers may be wrong.
Rényi, who was addicted to coffee, is the source of the quote: "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems", which is generally ascribed to Erdős. He wrote 32 joint papers with Paul Erdős, the most well-known of which are his papers introducing the Erdős–Rényi model of random graphs.

Alfréd and Katalin had a daughter, Zsuzsanna, born in 1948.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Alfréd Rényi
• Wikidata: Item Q465715, en:Wikipedia
• https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Renyi/
• https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/renyi-alfred
• The National Archives at Washington, D.C.; Washington, D.C.; NAI Number: 2848504; Record Group Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2004; Record Group Number: 85; Series Number: A3998; NARA Roll Number: 505
• https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/206556669/alfréd-rényi