Professor Erol Gelenbe, member of the Informatics Section of the Academia Europaea, has just been appointed as new member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

We have just been informed of Erol Gelenbe's election as foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Their elections take place every three years, and they elect one to three foreign members in each section.

In Mathematics this year they elected as foreign members Gromov (Abel Prize winner), Varadhan (large deviations, Courant Institute) and Zoltan Szabo from Princeton who is actually Hungarian.

Erol Gelenbe have been elected in the Engineering Sciences section where the two other new members are Michael Thompson (Cambridge Theoretical Physics and Applied Math, nonlinear dynamics & chaos) and Marian Kazmierkowski (Warsaw, power electronics).

For anyone, this is indeed a great honour because of the pioneering breakthroughs of Hungarians such as von Neumann, Erdos (graph theory and combinatorics), Gabor, Renyi (probability), Kalman (of the filter ... and system theory), Gabor (filter theory, holograms, Nobel laureate), Bollobas (graphs), Barabasi (statistical mechanics and random graphs), and engineers such as Simonyi (who designed the much maligned Word text processing system that we all use), Takacs (queueing theory), Belady (implementation of virtual memory that we all unknowingly use on a daily basis), and several others. Kalman, Barabasi, Bollobas, Simonyi and Belady are still members of this academy; Karl Astrom and Rudy Kalman serve on its “quality committee”.

AE and the Informatics Section congratulate Erol Gelenbe to this outstanding appointment.

Hermann Maurer, May 4, 2010, Chair of Informatics Section